Impact of Factors of Workplace Sexual Harassment on Organizational Performance: Evidence from Selected Organisations In Tarkwa

Abstract

When people become targets of unwanted sexual comments, sexual gestures, or sexual actions as a result of their gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation, the grounds become fertile and conducive for sexual harassment to occur. Owing to the disregard for the rather frequent occurrence of workplace sexual harassment and its occasional life-long effects on victims and work performance especially with women, and organizations in the long-run, this study focused on assessing the frequency, driving factors and the impact of sexual harassment cases in selected organizations in Tarkwa. Using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), the study employed correlation and logistic multiple regression and relative importance index (RII) to analyses primary data collected from 280 employees across selected top 20 organizations in Tarkwa. It was found that female employees continued to bear the brunt of sexual harassment in organizations in Tarkwa, where these experiences are suffered at least once every day at workplaces and on relatively few occasions once every week. Whiles a substantial number of male employees also felt harassed at least once every month, once every quarter of the year and once every six months. It is revealed also that organizational setting and male-female ratios are top contributing factors of workplace sexual harassment. While males believed the economics of women’s work is a key contributing factor of workplace sexual harassment, females consider it the least important. To female employees, power is at the center of workplace sexual harassment. Like females, male respondents also deemed victim blaming as not a very critical contributing factor to workplace sexual harassment. Sexual harassment experiences among employees in organizations in Tarkwa has strong significant negative impact on their performance, as well as the performance of the entire organization. The effect on the organization is relatively higher than the effect on employee performance. Meanwhile, majority of the selected firms in Tarkwa have policies in place, encourage employees to behave appropriately, and punish perpetrators of sexual harassment. However, they fail to conduct trainings, anonymous investigations into sexual harassment concerns and therefore unable to protect victims. Organizations were admonished to enforce existing policies on training, reporting, investigating and punishing workplace sexual harassment incidents, as well as adopting modern technologies of monitoring such incidents.