THE BARANAGAR JUTE MILL KILLINGS

While research on workplace aggression has been accumulating, there are few in-depth studies on workplace homicide to offer guidance. Existing research on workplace aggression tends to explain organization-wide aggregated aggressive behaviors by corresponding organizational level aggregated variables. Understanding the perpetrators intent or mens rea, i.e., the thoughts and intentions behind the act, seems to have been relegated to the sidelines and thus these studies do not offer any insight as to why a particular incident occurred, and how a conflict escalated into the extreme outcome. An incident of workplace conflict which escalated into multiple homicides, one by the CEO in apparent self defence and the other carried out by a collective body of workers in response to the killing by the CEO, has been studied to understand perpetrators motives and escalating action-choices. This book, by offering a different research approach, should be useful to researchers who want to develop a detailed understanding of the phenomenon and especially useful to managers who need to develop sensitivity to the causal factors so as to be able to develop effective steps to nullify them.