So that X is an asshole, if Y feels a certain way.
I just don't agree with the general trend to automatically privilege the offended. Sometimes I find them justified, sometimes I don't.
There is no "verbal aggression" meter that I am aware of, and I doubt that your study used one. There are people interacting, and people doing studies and characterizing their interactions as "aggression". Aggressiveness itself is not even necessarily a problem. It's likely that what I'd call aggression causes the biggest problem events, but the every day problematic work interactions I'm familiar with are more driven by emotional and economic insecurity than by what I'd call "aggression". People are defensive and fearful, and lash out or feel hurt when they perceive a threat.
What I noticed from reading the slides is that the cost is born out in the decreased productivity of the "targets", not the "assholes". That doesn't really make the case that the "assholes" are the problem.
I suppose there's a risk of Goodhart's Law-- any measurement which is used to guide policy will become corrupt.
I called it aggression. I'm not sure that the guy in the video did.
The intent isn't to solve every workplace problem. It's to solve one quite serious problem which appears in volunteer organizations (the video focused on open source projects) as well as conventional employment.
The claim is that a small percentage of people habitually leave the other people (probably the people of lower status) around them feeling miserable, and this is a problem.
O...
http://blip.tv/tech-love-live/osb09-donnie-berkholz-assholes-are-killing-your-project-2464449
This is specifically about why it's important to get assholes out of open source projects, but it applies in general. It includes an analysis of the social cost of keeping people around who frequently make other people unhappy, and in particular a way to balance the social costs (distraction, people doing much less work or leaving, useful volunteers not joining, assholes recruiting other assholes, etc.) of assholes against the useful work some of them do.