In May 2025, Dr Sarah Brooks, Lecturer in Organisational Psychology, took part in a panel session to discuss ways in which voice and silence research can prevent and deal with workplace violence. The discussion was hosted by Professors Rosalind Searle and Roberta Fida as part of the Impact Incubator which aims at providing academic evidence to inform and engage senior policy makers across Europe.
The panel consisted of a disciplinary diverse range of academics from numerous international universities, each of them contributing expertise from their specific domain. Sarah specifically discussed the way that coaching can support people to find their voice and speak out about workplace sexual harassment, a form of workplace violence which has a large psychological and economic impacts on individuals and organisations.
Alongside Sarah, Dr Michael Knoll (Leipzig University) spoke about how cultures of silence can foster and prevail in environments of workplace violence, using some high-profile cases as examples of the scale of the problem. Meanwhile Professor Martin Edwards (University of Queensland) provided some perspectives from Australia and the UK on the HRM and Industrial Relations landscape, showing how the low union membership is a risk to the representation of employees. Dr Pawel Jurek (University of Gdansk) and Dr Sylwiusz Retowski (SPWS University, Poland) presented a study which highlighted voice and silence in an Eastern European context, emphasizing the ambivalent role of identification, whilst Professor Lotta Dellve (University of Gothenburg) provided a Scandinavian work sociology perspective into voice and silence in workplace safety, emphasizing the role of norms of toughness and niceness.
As a whole, the panel presented a range of different perspectives on how voice and silence research can help those who are concerned with preventing and dealing with workplace violence highlighting the diversity and richness of academic research in this field.
I felt privileged to have taken part in this EAWOP Impact Incubator panel discussion on the prevalent and damaging problem of workplace violence. The conversation highlighted the important role that work psychology plays in addressing these types of challenges. The EAWOP Impact Incubator provides a fantastic platform to showcase the importance of work psychology in tackling workplace violence to policy makers and practitioners.
Dr Sarah Brooks
Lecturer in Organisational Psychology, Institute of Work Psychology