Romance usually factors in workplace violence

By David Singleton, NewsItem.com

Two to three times a day in America, an act of workplace violence ends in death.

Most involve robberies in which the victim and the perpetrator do not know each other. But in nearly a third of the cases, the lethal violence is the result of a personal relationship gone awry.

The murder-suicide Tuesday at Lockheed Martin in Archbald, in which police say plant security guard George Zadolnny shot and killed employee Deborah Bachak before taking his own life, followed a template familiar to workplace violence specialists.

Investigators said Ms. Bachak and Mr. Zadolnny had dated before she broke off their relationship several weeks ago.

Statistics show domestic disputes that spill into the workplace with deadly consequences are more common than the archetype of the disgruntled employee who kills a supervisor or fellow worker to avenge a perceived slight, said Laurence Barton, Ph.D.

“The vast majority are exactly what we think happened here … people who are dating or who had marital problems,” said Dr. Barton, a Bryn Mawr-based workplace violence expert and author of “Crisis Management Now,” published earlier this year by McGraw-Hill.

Of the 700 to 1,100 workplace homicides annually in the United States, an estimated 31 percent involve intimate or personal relationships — usually husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend — that have gone bad, Dr. Barton said. Only about 27 percent grow out of a dispute between an employee and an employer.

If there is a common thread, it is that both types of incidents usually involve a sense of betrayal, Dr. Barton said.

“It’s a terribly powerful emotion,” he said.

W. Barry Nixon, executive director of the National Institute for the Prevention of Workplace Violence Inc., based in Orange County, Calif., said romantic entanglements between coworkers can be the “stickiest and trickiest” for an employer to deal with because things happen outside the workplace to which the company is not privy.

If a relationship goes awry and turns violent, the employer can be blindsided, he said.

“Preventing these incidents is difficult,” Mr. Nixon said. “At the end of the day, this is an emotional rage-type of situation, and there is not much the organization can do. These are the ones … that come out of the blue.”

Most major companies have developed workplace safety programs that include an element of domestic violence education, said Eugene A. Rugala, a former FBI profiler and workplace violence consultant who lives in Beaufort, S.C.

However, because domestic violence tends to be a private issue, the key is getting an employee who might feel threatened to make those concerns known to the employer, he said.

“That is always the weak link of any program — getting people comfortable to come forward to report something,” Mr. Rugala said.