Psychological injury claims are complicated on account of their intersectionality, as they are bio-psychosocial-politico-legal in naturei.
They have proven to be of increasing challenge to employers and regulators alike, on account of the escalating direct and indirect costs of prolonged claims duration. These challenges threaten the sustainability of our current schemes and are driving increases in workers compensation insurance costs to industry. The human cost is greater still.
From the outset an important factor to be acknowledged is that when it comes to psychological injury, we are looking at conditions in which perceptions drive reality. Treatment outcomes against time are far less linear and predictable than those for physical injury claims.
The Safe Work Australia Model Code of Practice provides us with a list of hazards that have potential to cause psychosocial harm. Whilst we can list all these hazards with the assumption that they are all created equal, that their exposure parameters may be equivalent and that they have similar psychopathogenicity – we collectively have a fairly superficial understanding of the causative factors that lead to compensable psychological harm in the workplace.
There has been very scant research that deals with this topic directly. In the absence of relevant evidence, we have been applying stress–strain hypotheses that date back to the 1970’s, such as Karasek’s job demands-control modelii, to compensable psychological injury.
In reality, remarkably few studies have been conducted to investigate what precipitates psychological injury claims as opposed to mental ill health outside of the workplace. In this article, we will be looking to psychological injury evidence that underpins one of the most critical psychosocial hazard domains, that is, the interpersonal domain.
The workers compensation data tells us that poorly managed hazards in the interpersonal domain contribute disproportionately to workplace psychological injury. Of around 10,000 serious psychological injury claims in 2021-22iii, the highest proportion (27.5%), were attributed to workplace bullying and/or harassment.
In this article, we will shed some light on an interesting piece of research from 2006 that reviewed over 157 NSW based psychological injury claims. At the time, this was representative of approximately 10% of all claimants for the state in a given year. The research pointed to a specific precipitating factor as being particularly psychopathogenic. One that too sits in the interpersonal domain and which can indeed be in itself a precursor to some forms of bullying: interpersonal conflict and more specifically, conflict that has become interpersonalised.
According to the Psychosocial Code of Practice, Conflict arises from “poor workplace relationships or interpersonal conflict between colleagues or from other businesses, clients or customers. Frequent disagreements, disparaging or rude comments, either from one person or multiple people, such as from clients or customers.”
Interpersonal conflict occurs on a spectrum. At the pointier end, it can best be conceptualised as a side-effect of work based human relationships breaking down. Conflict can and does take many forms and has been called by many names: from workplace incivility, horizontal violence to counter productive behaviours. Yet there is something about interpersonal conflict that makes it critically important to anyone wishing to make an impact on psychological injuries. In seminal research conducted by Gutierrez and Bazely in 2006, the authors found that interpersonal conflict was a precipitating factor, predictive of the development of psychopathology, at a higher rate than any other hazard in their review of compensable psychological injuries in NSW.