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An empirical investigation of sexual harassment and work engagement: Surprising differences between men and women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2015

Julie Ann Cogin  and
Alan Fish
Julie Ann Cogin
Affiliation:
School of Organisation and Management, Australia School of Business (incorporating AGSM), University of NSW, Sydney NSW, Australia
Alan Fish
Affiliation:
International School of Business, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga NSW, Australia
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Abstract

Research has demonstrated the growing prevalence of sexual harassment (SH) across continents, industries and occupations as well as the associated negative outcomes (Glomb et al. 1999). Not surprisingly, job satisfaction is one of the job-related variables that is frequently investigated in the SH literature, with Lapierre et al. (2005) meta-analytically establishing that SH significantly diminishes job satisfaction. Other studies have argued, however, that ‘satisfied’ employees do not necessarily perform to the best of their abilities (Crossman & Abou-Zaki 2003) and that work engagement is a better construct to understand what makes employees ‘go the extra mile’ (Hallgerg & Schaufeli 2006; Buckingham & Coffman 1999). This study, conducted in Australia, adopted the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al. 2002a), as an empirical gauge of the construct ‘work engagement’ and the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (Fitzgerald et al. 1988) to measure SH. A strong negative relationship was established in addition to significant differences in the SH experiences of men and women.

Keywords

sexual harassmentequal employment opportunitygenderengagement
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Management & Organization , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 47 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2009

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