Workplace relational aggression incurs substantial costs to organizations in the form of reduced employee effectiveness and can exact a personal toll on the targets of the aggression. The extant literature contains limited studies related to physiological variables in predicting the perpetration of workplace relational aggression. Using survey data from a large US military sample (N = 2290), this research tested a hypothesized indirect effects model of sleep and relational aggression against unit members. Results suggest that subjective sleep duration and discontinuity are associated indirectly with perpetrating relational aggression against unit members through higher levels of poor mental health symptoms. Moreover, this association was more robust at higher versus lower levels of trait anger. This research is among the first to examine sleep disturbance or mental health as potential upstream factors associated with instigating relational aggression in the workplace. This is also among the first scientific studies on perpetrating relational aggression against unit members in the US military.
Keywords: Workplace aggression; anger; anxiety; depression; post-traumatic stress disorder; sleep.
© 2021 Society for Military Psychology, Division 19 of the American Psychological Association.