Sexual Harassment In The Workplace Essay

The diversity of employee responses towards workplace sexual harassment

Introduction

Sexual assault has been a persistent and detrimental problem at workplace. Despite various attempts both publicly and privately to stop this behaviour, it is still happening and causing lots of concern. According to Australian Human Rights Commission, ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature which makes a person feel offended, humiliated and/or intimidated’ is seen as a sexual harassment. In the area of retail and hospitality where employees have lots of interactions with the customers, the prevalence of this incident seems to be higher than elsewhere. The article by Good L and Cooper R (2014) ‘Voicing their complaints? The silence of students working in

This point is supported by Nielsen and Einarsen (2012) in their study on the relationship between psychological distress and sexual harassment among male and female employees in Norway. However, Nielsen and Einarsen further prove that it has more serious psychological impact on women than men. Workplace sexual harassment causes psychological ill health and trauma that can last longer and be more profound in female workers. In addition to the impact on mental health, it also negatively affects the physical and occupational well-being of employees (Holland and Cortina 2013). As discovered in ‘Voicing their complaints? The silence of students working in retail and hospitality and sexual harassment from customers’, many participants feel threatened and insecure that it reduces their productivity and job satisfaction drastically. In approaching the causal sequence of sexual harassment, Poulston (2008) demonstrates the possible causes in a broader context. Instead of interpreting the reasons of silence and informal voice only base on participants’ view, Poulston (2008) also looks at social context, nature of the employment and attitude of the employee at workplace. Some of the jobs requires a lot of close interactions with customer where both customers and employees would conceive it as flirting is part of it. Moreover, in some cases manager and supervisor do not adequately address the problem reported by their employee due to the expense which comes when resolving it. As a result, it discourages employee in voicing their workplace sexual harassment as they see no point of reporting- if their problems are not solved. This study provides a deeper insight to the causal factors around employee