Ricerc@Sapienza

Introduction: Healthcare workers are particularly vulnerable to third-party workplace violence. The experience of work-related stress, by threatening the psychological balance of healthcare workers, making them less effective in man-aging the relationship with patients and their family members, may significantly contribute to third-party violence.

The social identity approach has been found very useful for the understanding of a range of phenomena within and across organizations. It has been applied in particular to analyze employees’ stress and well-being at work and their reactions to organizational change. In this paper, we argue that there is a mismatch between the theoretical notion of shared identities in teams and organizations and empirical research, which largely focuses on the individual employee's identification with his or her social categories at work.