CULTURAL FACTORS AS ASSOCIATES OF WORKPLACE SEXUAL HARASSMENT PERCEPTIONS AND COPING PREFERENCES

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2019

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: DİDEM DİNÇAL KUYTAK

Danışman: Yonca Toker

Özet:

The present study examined the association of cultural variables which were liberalism/conservatism, uncertainty avoidance, ambivalent sexism, and organizational climate related to workplace Sexual Harassment (SH) with perceiving the ambiguous forms of social-sexual incidents namely sexist hostility, sexual hostility, and insinuation of interest as SH. Women’s coping preferences for different forms of SH were examined on an exploratory basis. Data were collected from 226 women and 154 men employers who were mostly white-color workers. Results showed that there were no significant relationships between benevolent sexism and participants’ perception of ambiguous SH forms in either sample. Hostile sexism had small negative correlations with perceiving the composite ambiguous forms of SH, sexual hostility, and insinuation of interest; while it had no correlation with sexist hostility in the women sample. It had a small significant negative correlation with sexist hostility in the men sample. Conservatism had a significant negative correlation with perceiving only sexist hostility amongst women. Uncertainty avoidance had a significant positive but small correlation with perceiving sexual hostility as a form of SH amongst women. Amongst men there were no associations between conservatism and uncertainty avoidance with perceiving ambiguous forms of SH. Finally, there were no significant associations between SH related organizational climate and ambiguous SH forms for either sample. Results of exploratory analyses showed that perceiving sexual hostility was correlated with a preference for reporting to authorities and avoiding the harasser as coping mechanisms; while perceiving sexist hostility correlated with an inclination towards reporting to authorities and not avoiding the harasser.