Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

...

If the company or managers took an interest in employees and cared for them, it contributes to a positive effect on their motivation. When managers took a greater interest in employees they felt more valued and empowered. Employees often work best in teams they were also more motivated if they were managed and consulted more. Managers have responsibility for motivating individuals and their teams by communicating and explaining the vision, values and strategy to all team members so everyone will be working at the same level, also providing training, carrying out one-to-one meeting and putting in place succession planning for the team and managers roles to ensure long term performance.

Sexual harassment continues to be a workplace problem. Managers with a sociological orientation tend to emphasize a Weberian solution to the problem; those with a psychological orientation rely more on a human relation’s solution. While such a theoretical distinction is heuristically said, it is conceptually misleading, implying that the one approach is the primary, if not the only, way to accomplish the organization task. At the individual level if there are healthy working relations there would be fewer problems with workers and therefore less sexual harassment.

The weakness of this theory is that people are not always friendly, and they make mistakes and errors that could cause major issues.

The strengths of this theory are- it has predictive power in that it predicts that when outcomes are perceived to be greater individuals self-disclose more. It also helps to understand the cost and rewards of relationships and salon helps us predict how to keep and sustain relationships.

Organizational Learning:

This theory says that organizational learning denotes a change in organizational knowledge. Organizational learning typically adds to, transforms, or reduces organizational knowledge. Theories of organizational learning attempts to understand where they have done well and where they have gone wrong in order to reduce their mistakes improve individual worker performance and foster organizational advances.

Organizational Learning draws much of its appeal from the reality that people in the organizations are capable of intelligent behavior, and that learning is a tool for intelligence, though sometimes, an intriguingly unreliable one. Current approaches to organizational learning emphasize routines as repositions of knowledge and they conceptualize learning as making and up dialing of routines in response to experiences (Levitt and March, 1988).

The ultimate responsibility for maintaining and environment free from sexual harassment rest with employers, from a human rights perspective it is not acceptable to choose to stay unaware of sexual harassment, whether or not a human claim has been made. Employers must make sure they maintain poison-free environments that respect human rights. This takes commitment and work, but is worth it. An organization may respond to complaints about instances of discrimination and harassment, but still be found to have not responded appropriately if the underlying problem is not resolved. Organizations must take further steps, such as training and education, to better address the problem. Policies must clearly set how the sexual harassment will be dealt with promptly and efficiently.

The strengths of this theory are it emphasizes using Comprehensive, Systematic, and Sequential Performance Improvement Models. These models are comprehensive, systematic, and sequential. As a result, they provide performance professionals with excellent trouble shooting guides on which to base their practice.

They can be used to isolate problems and breakdowns in the human performance system and the organizational system. They can also be used to identify the gap between the currant and desired performance states, isolate factors affecting performance, and aid in the selection of interventions used to improve performance and address breakdowns.

The weakness of this theory is although learning is a powerful process; it has limitations, a focus on the individual, treatment as a panacea, lack of infrastructure, and a failure to restructure existing power relations in organizations.

Learning based HRD programs tend to focus on individuals, thus making them less applicable to HRD initiatives that concentrate on the group or organizational level. Unfortunately, learning that is not reinforced or valued by the organization will be forgotten and never applied. Consequently, training for training’s sake in hoe that individual, organizational, and societal development will naturally occur is simply unrealistic.

Phenomenology:

This theory is sometimes considered a philosophical perspective as well as an approach to qualitative methodology and is the study of consciousness as experienced from the first- person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Ponty and others.

The goal of phenomenology is to enlarge and deepen understanding of the range of immediate experiences (Spiegel berg, 1902). Whatever happens in the workplace have meaning to what they are doing and that’s why they continue to do it. The perpetrators of abuse in the workplace continue their behavior because of their interpretations of the situation.

Organizational climate (i.e., tolerance of sexual harassment, and the general nature of an organization (i.e., proportion of women in a work group) play an important part in the occurrence of sexual harassment (Willis et al.2000). This theory allows researchers to check, refine, and develop their ideas and intuitions about their findings as the data are collected. Such qualitative methods have been used often in many disciplines and for the investigation of many topics.

The strengths of this theory are that it focuses on Husserlian “life-world” and as such, re-invigorates the place of subjectivity in existential dialogue.

The weakness of this theory – difficulties with analysis and interpretation, usually lower levels of validity and reliability compared to positivism, and more time and other resources required for data collection.

Systems theory:

Systems concepts include: system-environment boundary, input, output, process, state, hierarchy, goal-directedness, and