Identifying the Aggressive Personality

Abstract Acts of workplace aggression by coworkers take a tremendous toll on organizations and their employees. This paper explores the thought processes used by aggressive individuals to rationalize hostile behaviors and discusses various types of workplace aggression. This paper also presents a new personality test, the Conditional Reasoning Test of Aggression, which addresses some of the shortcomings of self-report personality tests that have traditionally been used to identify and screen out aggressive applicants.