Workplace Conflict · Psychological Safety

Lateral Violence in the WorkplaceAn Employer’s Guide

It arrives looking like a personality clash, gets managed like one, and gets worse. The behaviours are ordinary. The engine underneath them is not.

Sam Kemble · 31 August 2026

Definition

What is lateral violence?

Some of the hardest workplace conflict files I have handled were misdiagnosed from the first day.

They arrived looking like a personality clash, or a bullying complaint, or a difficult employee who needed managing. They were treated accordingly. And they got worse — because what was actually happening was lateral violence, and the ordinary playbook does not work on it.

Lateral violence — also called horizontal violence, which is the term the nursing literature and Freire himself use — is aggression directed inward: at peers, at people less powerful, and at oneself, by members of a group that is itself under pressure, rather than at the source of that pressure.

The shorthand: the oppressed become the oppressors. Not because of any defect in the people involved, but because the actual source of the harm is unreachable, unaccountable, or too dangerous to confront — and the anger has to go somewhere.

The term traces to the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who described "horizontal violence" in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Freire's insight was that members of oppressed groups can become what he called sub-oppressors, turning hostility on their peers rather than on the system above them. He attributed it to low self-esteem, powerlessness, and fear of reprisal: striking sideways feels survivable in a way that striking upward does not.

It has since been documented in two large bodies of work. One is Indigenous — in Canada and Australia — where it is understood as a consequence of colonization, residential schools, racism, and intergenerational trauma. The other is occupational, most extensively in nursing, where it has been studied since the early 1980s. Prevalence estimates there vary enormously depending on definition and method — commonly cited ranges put the share of nurses who have experienced it in some form somewhere between 45 and 80 per cent, and some studies go higher still. Treat the range, not any single figure, as the finding.

That second body of literature matters for a management audience, because it establishes something important: lateral violence is a structural phenomenon, not an ethnic one. It appears wherever a group holds real grievance and lacks a safe route to express it upward. Any workplace can generate the conditions. Many do.

Detection

What does lateral violence look like at work?

This is where managers go wrong, because the behaviours are unremarkable on their own.

The Native Women's Association of Canada catalogues more than twenty of them:

• gossip and rumour;
• name-calling;
• eye-rolling and sarcasm;
• exclusion from the group;
• withholding information someone needs to do their job;
• setting unreasonable deadlines;
• deliberate rudeness, by email or in person;
• shaming and blaming;
• backstabbing;
• undermining someone's standing with others; and
• questioning whether a person is really who they claim to be.

Individually, every one of these reads as ordinary workplace friction. That is precisely the problem. In one systematic review of Indigenous women's experiences, the overwhelming majority of incidents — 96 per cent in one sample — were covert rather than overt. There is rarely an incident. There is a climate.

A manager looking for a shouting match, a threat, or a clear act of misconduct will not find one. They will find a team where something is plainly wrong, a series of complaints that individually sound petty, and a growing pile of people who want to transfer out.

Diagnosis

Why managers misdiagnose lateral violence

Three reasons, and each of them is expensive.

It looks exactly like narcissistic conduct.

Gossip, exclusion, shaming, undermining — those are the surface behaviours of a high-entitlement employee, and they are the surface behaviours of lateral violence. Same appearance. Completely different engine. If you run a performance management file against a lateral violence pattern, you will discipline a symptom, miss the cause, and quite possibly confirm for everyone involved that the organization punishes the people already under pressure. I have written separately about managing narcissistic conduct; telling the two apart is the first job, not a footnote.

The bullying playbook assumes the wrong shape.

Conventional anti-bullying frameworks assume a power differential and a perpetrator-target pair: someone above, someone below, a clear direction of harm. Lateral violence is peer-to-peer, frequently reciprocal, and often circulates through a group rather than running from one person to another. Applying a framework built for a different geometry produces investigations that identify the wrong person and remedies that do not touch the cause.

Nobody wants to name what is underneath it.

Lateral violence in an Indigenous workforce is a consequence of history the employer did not create but does have to work within. That is uncomfortable, and discomfort produces avoidance. The result is a manager who addresses the gossip and never asks why this team, why now.

Detection

Who gets targeted by lateral violence?

This is the tell that most reliably separates lateral violence from ordinary bullying, and every manager should know it.

The targets are frequently the people doing well. NWAC's list is specific:

• new employees, during a transition;
• staff who have just been promoted, where the promotion is seen as undeserved;
• younger workers with more formal education; and
• people who are good at their job and popular with others.

What these have in common is visible success that suggests the person has moved closer to the dominant system — and who is therefore experienced, consciously or not, as having left.

Ordinary bullying tends to run downhill toward the vulnerable. Lateral violence often runs at the person who got ahead. If your strongest people are the ones leaving a particular team, and the reasons they give are vague and interpersonal, that is a signal worth taking seriously.

Many readers will already have a picture for this. Noel Pearson has recounted Paul Keating telling him that the trouble was "you're like crabs in a bucket… if one of you starts climbing out and gets his claws on the rim, the other mob will be pulling him back down."

The image gets one thing exactly right. The crab that gets grabbed is the one climbing out.

It gets the more important thing wrong. Crabs do that by instinct, in a bucket nobody built. People do it because the way up is closed and the way sideways is the only way left — and the bucket is almost always something somebody made.

Conditions

What makes lateral violence flare up?

Lateral violence intensifies under specific, recognisable organizational conditions — and this is the part most directly within an employer's control.

NWAC is specific about this. Lateral violence is more prevalent:

• in workplaces with poor organizational systems;
• in organizations undergoing change, such as downsizing or merging; and
• at moments when power is shifting.

Three further conditions are worth adding:

• a lack of recognition and engagement;
• pitting groups against each other — a point made in the Australian literature and one I would underline for Canadian employers; and
• scarce advancement, which in my own experience is the worst of them, because a closed ladder turns every colleague into a competitor for the one rung that might open.

Every practitioner reading this will recognise that list. It describes a construction project moving into demobilisation. It describes a merger. It describes a bargaining round. It describes any workplace where people have real grievances and no credible route to raise them.

Which leads to the uncomfortable question an employer should be asking: not only "who is behaving badly," but "what are we doing that is making this worse?"

Practice

How should employers respond to lateral violence?

Name it.

This is the consistent first recommendation across every source, and it is not a soft measure. Naming lateral violence — describing what it is, in plain terms, as an organization — is itself an act of prevention. It gives people a word for something they have experienced and could not previously explain, and it removes the pretence that this is just how people are.

Do it before there is an incident.

Awareness work landing in the middle of an active complaint reads as a manoeuvre. Done in advance — as ordinary education, alongside the way you already handle harassment and psychological safety — it changes what people expect of each other before there is anything to defend.

Audit your own conditions.

Look honestly at whether your structures inflame the problem. Is authority clear? Are the rules applied consistently? Is recognition visible and fair? Is advancement real? Are you, in effect, setting groups against one another through how work, overtime, or opportunity is distributed? Individual conduct still has to be addressed individually — but the systemic component will not improve through discipline, because discipline was never aimed at it.

Build toward lateral kindness, not just away from harm.

The First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia frames the constructive counterpart as lateral kindness, which it defines as "an approach based on First Nations teachings and beliefs about respect, fairness, and the importance of social harmony, community, and healthy relationships." The orientation is toward lifting each other up rather than merely refraining from harm. I would encourage employers to take that framing seriously rather than treating it as a slogan. A policy that only prohibits is a policy people comply with minimally. A standard people are building toward is one they will enforce among themselves, which is the only enforcement that ever works at scale.

Make room for other approaches to resolution, where appropriate.

Sharing circles, learning and healing circles, and shared care are used in Indigenous contexts and are recommended by Indigenous organizations. An employer should not impose these, and should not appropriate them. But an employer should know they exist, and should be prepared to support them where the people involved want them and the community can guide them.

Practice — Discipline

Can you discipline someone for lateral violence?

Management-side readers will want a straight answer on this, so here it is.

Understanding the cause does not suspend the obligation. That obligation has a name, and in most Canadian workplaces more than one. Federally regulated employers work under Part II of the Canada Labour Code and the Work Place Harassment and Violence Prevention Regulations (SOR/2020-130), which require a workplace assessment, a prevention policy, training and a defined resolution process. In Alberta, Part 27 of the Occupational Health and Safety Code carries the violence and harassment requirements, including a prevention plan. Whichever regime you are in, your duty to provide a workplace free from psychological harm does not bend because the conduct has a historical explanation. Where behaviour is serious, persistent, or is injuring someone, it must be addressed — investigated properly, documented contemporaneously, and dealt with under your ordinary standards. Organizations increasingly treat lateral violence the way they treat harassment: as something people can be disciplined or dismissed for. That is appropriate.

What is not appropriate is stopping there. Discipline handles the individual instance. It does nothing about the conditions producing a pattern, and an employer who reaches only for discipline will be running the same file again in eighteen months with different names on it.

Both things are true at once. Address the conduct. Fix what is generating it.

Conclusion

Fixing something, or disciplining someone for it

Lateral violence is one of the few workplace problems where the employer is simultaneously not the cause and very much part of the mechanism. The history behind it is not yours. The conditions amplifying it very likely are.

For managers, the practical value is in the diagnosis. When a team is coming apart through gossip, exclusion and quiet undermining; when the complaints all sound petty in isolation; when the people leaving are the ones who were doing well — do not reach automatically for the difficult-employee file. Ask what pressure this group is under, and where it has to go.

Getting that question right is the difference between fixing something and disciplining someone for it.