Influences on Women's Perceptions of Climate for Sexual Harassment

Organizational tolerance of sexual harassment has been repeatedly touted as an important antecedent of sexual harassment.

Yet, not much is known about the antecedents of perceptions of organizational tolerance.

Based on theories from the sexual harassment, organizational justice, and psychological climate literatures, individuals were hypothesized to use evaluations of their personal harassment experiences (influenced by individual characteristics), workgroup harassment factors, and organization-relevant harassment factors to form beliefs about organizational tolerance.

Two theoretical models of antecedents of women's tolerance perceptions were proposed based on the experiences of three groups of women: women who did not directly experience sexual harassment (non-targets), women who directly experienced sexual harassment but did not report the harassment (non-reporters), and women who reported their sexual harassment experiences to the organization (reporters).

Archival survey data from seven different organizations were meta-analytically combined and subjected to path analyses and other regression techniques in order to test the theoretical models.

Although the initial, theoretical models suffered from poor fit, revised models generally fit the data and had similar patterns of relationships as the initial models.

The results supported the main hypothesis that women use information about their personal harassment experiences, harassment in their work environments, and organization-relevant information (e.g., knowledge of the organization's harassment policy and procedures) to make assessments about organizational tolerance of sexual harassment.