The Violence We Do in the Workplace: Horizontal Violence

There is a term almost all of us who've worked in the mission-driven space have experienced and likely haven't named. Horizontal violence. I was introduced to it recently by a senior leader who has had to lead through it in a wide variety of contexts.

Most people outside of healthcare and academic sociology haven't heard of it. But once you encounter it, you start seeing it everywhere, including in US domestic politics. There is plenty that can be done to counter it. None of it is fast, most of it is free.

What It Is

The concept originates with Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher whose 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains foundational in critical theory. Freire observed that when groups are systematically constrained; their autonomy, advancement, and self-expression controlled by forces with greater power, that they may not be able to direct their reactions towards the correct and most deserving source. Since they cannot, they direct it sideways. At their peers. In their families. At each other. And where they spend significant portions of the day: the workplace. 

He called these individuals "sub-oppressors": people whose aggression flows along the horizontal axis of shared experience. The logic is psychologically coherent. Confronting power is risky. Confronting a peer or family member is not, or at least appears not to be.

The term has been most rigorously studied in nursing, a profession that has long operated under conditions Freire would recognize: hierarchical management, chronic resource scarcity, and a predominantly female workforce navigating significant institutional power imbalances.¹ The patterns documented there translate with uncomfortable precision to the mission-driven sector.

Horizontal violence is distinct from conventional bullying, which requires a power differential. This happens among peers. It is covert, repeated, and because it occurs in the gaps between formal authority, it can be hard for leadership to see, let alone address.

Why NGOs Are Particularly Vulnerable

Civil society organizations exist in a condition of managed tension. They are motivated by causes that genuinely require urgency, yet routinely operate with the resources of organizations one-quarter their ambition. They attract people who care deeply, often people with personal proximity to the problems they are working to solve, and ask those people to bring their full selves to work at a significant pay discount.

This creates a pressure system with no obvious release valve.²

What Freire identified in contexts of political oppression is present here in organizational form. People who feel unable to adequately confront the systemic forces constraining them; the power imbalance of funding structures, board dynamics, constant escalation of externally-driven priorities, redirect that energy sideways. At the colleague who got the promotion. At the new hire who represents a directional change. At the person who seems to have better work-life balance, which must mean they care less.

The result is an organization consuming its own.

Mission-driven workplaces cultivate closeness deliberately; shared values, shared adversity, work that creates genuine intimacy. But that same closeness lowers the threshold for what gets named and addressed. When an organization functions like a family, it recreates the dysfunction of families. The assumption of good intent becomes a shield. The loyalty that makes the culture warm makes it harder to say, formally and clearly, that what is happening is not acceptable.

There is a distinction worth drawing carefully here: being trauma-bonded through the work is one thing. Being trauma-bonded over how terrible the workplace is is a warning sign that the container is broken.

What It Actually Looks Like

Horizontal violence can be dramatic. It can also be quiet. Whispers. Disengagement.

It is the senior program officer who is unfailingly warm one-on-one and systematically undercuts other’s ideas in meetings. The deliberate omission; a meeting not calendared, a document not shared, a context not provided, that leaves a peer slightly less able to do their job. The informal network that makes real decisions based on the comfort of the people they prefer to work with, before they arrive in the room where everyone is supposed to have input.

Feedback delivered without substantiation, with a high bar of expectation for the recipient to change or account for themselves by someone who has never held themselves to the same rigor. The person who speaks at every possible opportunity to hear the sound of their own voice (I’ve been guilty of this). The long-tenured staff member who responds to every proposed change with the history of why it won't work, and has learned to frame institutional resistance as institutional knowledge.What makes this particularly difficult is that the cover story is always available: the work is too important, the moment too critical, for this conversation right now.

The Urgency Problem

When everything is urgent, nothing is prioritizable. Individuals under chronic urgency are not making their best judgments. Urgency concentrates decisions at the top by default. When decisions travel up before they travel out, everyone below waits. Waiting breeds resentment. Resentment looks for somewhere to go.

Organizations can interrupt this cycle by developing a shared, explicit definition of what constitutes urgency. Not a theoretical one, but a working one, revisited at a cadence calibrated to how dynamic the operating environment actually is. Externalizing those criteria reduces the ambient pressure horizontal violence feeds on, and removes urgency as a tool for concentrating informal control.

The Importance of Presence

It is natural to want to process what is happening in real time with your colleagues. It is just not always the healthiest thing for the room or for the people in it who may need to have their own reaction privately before they are ready to contribute to a collective one.

Presence does not mean immediacy. It means showing up with authenticity, vulnerability, and openness, which is actually made possible, not undermined, by structured communication. When people know what to expect, when the agenda arrives before the meeting and decisions are shared in writing as well as verbally, they can process on their own time and arrive prepared. The meeting becomes a genuine exchange rather than the first moment anyone is encountering the information. That is more efficient and more humane simultaneously.

A few practices that create this condition: share agendas in advance and invite people to contribute to them before the meeting, not just during it. Follow verbal communications with written ones, especially for anything directional. Repeat critical information — more than once, across more than one channel. If you are getting eye rolls, the message is landing. That is the goal.

The instinct to go quiet during difficult periods is understandable and counterproductive. Hard moments are precisely when consistent, predictable communication matters most, because it is what allows leaders to be genuinely present when they show up, rather than consumed by the information vacuum their silence created.⁶

This is also where third places become relevant to organizational health. Ray Oldenburg's concept names the social environments — the café, the community center, the library — that exist outside both home and work, where people connect and decompress without professional stakes attached. We are still recovering them post-pandemic. Their absence means the workplace absorbs social and emotional weight it was never designed to carry. When people have somewhere else to process, the all-hands meeting can be what it is supposed to be: a professional gathering, not a therapy session. Encouraging investment in life outside the organization is not a wellness gesture. It is a structural one.

What Everyone Can Do

The most important shift in addressing horizontal violence is refusing to locate it solely in HR or in leadership. It is everyone's problem, which means the response has to be everyone's as well.

Name it. If your organization only describes peer-to-peer destructive behavior as "drama" or "personality conflicts," it will be managed as an interpersonal problem rather than a structural one. Language makes behavior addressable. Introducing the term — including its origins and its documented effects on organizational capacity — gives teams a frame that is more precise and less personalizing. Name it and name what is unacceptable. The behavior is the problem. 

Make values behavioral. A values document is not a norm. Translate it: what does accountability look like in practice? What is the process when behavior doesn't align? Who addresses it, and how? Be specific enough that violation is recognizable when it occurs.

Empowered decision making with transparency. Apply the principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be made as far down the organizational chain as safely possible, by the people closest to the work, with transparency such that executives always know what is happening and where, immediately. When people have genuine ownership over decisions within their domain, they have less cause to compete horizontally for influence. And when leaders are not consumed by decisions that could be made below them, they are available for what only they can do — including being a visible, measured, predictable presence during turbulence. Predictability here matters as much as availability.⁵

Invest in humanization. Horizontal violence is most active where people are opaque to each other. There are many ways to connect in the workplace that also stand to support the mission. For instance, learning lunches, where a team member shares something they know well that is adjacent to the work, are one of the most practical antidotes available. The person who shared their expertise on Thursday is harder to undermine in Tuesday's meeting; you know something about them now that doesn't fit the narrative lateral aggression requires. AMAs, open to any member of the team including leadership, serve a related function: they lower artificial altitude between levels, give access to the reasoning behind decisions, and model the curiosity that makes horizontal violence less available as a default. Neither requires a budget. Both require intention. 

Build the manager layer. Managers are closest to where horizontal violence operates and most under-equipped to address it. Invest in the specific, practiced skills required to name behavioral patterns before they calcify,  including rituals that create legitimate containers for relational work.³

Encourage third places. The café, the community organization, the faith community, the running group — the social environments that exist outside both home and work where people connect without professional stakes attached. Be explicit that the person with a life outside this organization is not less committed to the mission. They are more sustainably positioned to serve it.

There is also a practical boundary worth naming: some conversations belong in the community, not the office. The frustration about a political development, the need to process a social injustice, the desire to organize around a cause — these are legitimate and important. They are also better held in spaces designed for them, among people who share the stakes personally, than in a staff meeting where the professional relationships and power dynamics of the workplace are always present whether acknowledged or not. The office can acknowledge. It cannot always hold. Knowing the difference is a form of organizational hygiene that most mission-driven organizations have never explicitly named.

At every level: You have more influence here than you may realize. Horizontal violence travels through informal channels; the side conversation, the group text, the "can you believe" that precedes gossip dressed as concern. You can simply decline to participate. "I don't think I'm the right person to have this conversation with" is complete. You don't need to escalate. You don't need to lecture. Just don't be the next node in the network. That is a genuine contribution to organizational culture, and it is available to everyone regardless of title.

The Cost of Not Acting

Horizontal violence is an HR problem: it produces formal complaints, managed exits, documented conflicts that consume capacity organizations don't have to spare. But it is also a structural problem, and the structural cost is measurable in time. The leader who spends three hours managing the aftermath of a conflict that shouldn't have happened. The manager who cancels a planning meeting to do relationship repair. The director who rewrites a strategy because the person who should have owned it was excluded from the information they needed. The senior staff member performing at 60% because they have decided the environment isn't worth their full investment.

Multiply that across a team of twenty, or fifty, or two hundred. The time is not abstract. It is grant deliverables not written. Partnerships not built. Policy windows not seized.

Every hour spent in its orbit is an hour the mission is not advancing. Given what most mission-driven organizations exist to change in the world, that is not a cost anyone can afford to absorb indefinitely.

Notes

¹ Horizontal violence in nursing has been studied extensively; reported prevalence rates vary widely across studies (approximately 7%–73% depending on methodology). For an overview, see the American Nurses Association's 2015 Position Statement on Incivility, Bullying and Workplace Violence, and the body of work citing Freire's framework in healthcare contexts.

² On the structural conditions that produce burnout in mission-driven organizations — including the weaponization of passion and the nonprofit starvation cycle — see When Passion Becomes the Justification for Burnout, You've Lost the Mission.

³ Fairhurst, G.T. & Putnam, L.L., Performing Organizational Paradoxes (2024). I am working from secondary citation of this work and recommend reading the primary source before citing directly.

⁴ On managing teams through external disruption — including the case against large group processing meetings — see Managing People in Distracted Times.

⁵ On subsidiarity in practice and the operational value of predictable communication, see forthcoming Care is Operational Strategy series and What Makes a Communication Strategy Work.