The Impact of Organizational Environment on Reporting Sexual Harassment: A Meta-Analytic Review

1 online resource (104 pages) : PDF

2021

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This meta-analytic review integrates a micro-perspective theory of coping responses with the macro-perspective institutional theory of moral collapse to understand the likelihood of an employee reporting sexual harassment. I build on previous studies to evaluate three broad research questions: (1) What is the relatively most important predictor of workplace sexual harassment?; (2) To what extent do contingency factors influence employees reporting sexual harassment?; and (3) What are the gaps in the macro literature that need to be addressed to integrate macro and micro perspectives? Based on previous research, classifications of individual-, industry-, and country-level factors are proposed that influence reporting sexual harassment and then are used in the analysis of 284 independent samples, consisting of 538,426 individuals. First, perception of the global organizational environment may be a relatively more important predictor of reporting sexual harassment than the individual difference variables of age and tenure under the institutional theory of moral collapse (Lawrence, 2011). For example, justice climate had a large effect size ( = .43) in comparison to gender ( = -.29) and age ( = -.19) when predicting the reporting of work-related harassment. In addition, this study shows the extent to which various job attitudes correlated with the likelihood to report sexual harassment as employees’ coping response (Sigal et al., 2003). Second, the power and masculinity norms of the country where the business is located as well as the type of industry are contingency factors that likely moderate the relationship between global organizational environment and reporting sexual harassment as a coping response (Hofstede, 2015). The evidence shows that there was a large effect size difference between the correlation of the perceptions of the global organizational environment and reporting sexual harassment when moderated by the high-power distance in other countries ( = .24) compared to the United States ( = -.23). Third, there is a lack of macro-level research with only 15% of the studies utilizing variables considered firm-level antecedents of sexual harassment, and only 3% of them focusing on firms' responses to sexual harassment claims in this meta-analysis. In the Discussion, I identify several gaps in the literature, suggest directions for future research, and highlight organizational policies to reduce the risk of sexual harassment.  

doctoral dissertations

Management

D.B.A.

Business Administration

Banks, George

Gooty, Janaki
Yavorsky, Jill
Stuart, Jennifer

Thesis (D.B.A.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2021.

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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:1861