The Effect Of Workplace Sexual Harassment On Female Employees' Stress Of Interpersonal Relationship

As an interpersonal aggression,sexual harassment prevailing in workplace will cause adverse effects to employees and organizations.Workplace sexual harassment not only negatively affects the physical and psychological health of victims,but also damages the interests of organiztions directly or indirectly.Even though research on workplace sexual harassment has proliferated over the past thirty years,few of studies were conducted in Chinese context.Given the prevalence and harmfulness of workplace sexual harassment as well as the lack of relevant research,more attention should be paid on this topic.Harmony tendency that identified as a typical attitude of East Asians is generally connected with positive outcomes.However,harmony tendency is likely to act as a hindrance under some specific circumstances.Following the conventional translation and back-translation procedure,study 1 revises the Sexual Experience Questionnaire that originally developed by Fitzgerald et al.(1995).The questionnaire includes various situations of sexual harassment that female employees may encounter in the workplace.Adapted into Chinese,the revised workplace sexual harassment questionnaire shows high reliability and validity.Based on cognitive dissonance theory,study 2 hypothesizes the positive relationship between workplace sexual harassment and female employees' stress of interpersonal relationship at work.Furhermore,the mediating role of anxiety and the moderating role of harmony tendency that may play in this relationship are also proposed.Employing SPSS 20.0,LISREL 8.7 and PROCESS,study 2 estimates the possibility of whether female employees' harmony tendency would be a second-stage moderator on the indirect relationship between workplace sexual harassment and female employees' stress of interpersonal relationship at work via anxiety.Two-wave data collected from 219 full-time female employees in Chinese organizations supports the above hypothesized model.The conclusions are as follows:(1)With high reliability and validity,the revised workplace sexual harassment questionnaire is applicable to the measurement of workplace sexual harassment in Chinese context;(2)Workplace sexual harassment is positively related to female employees' anxiety and their stress of interpersonal relationship at work;(3)Female employees' anxiety partially mediates the positive relationship between workplace sexual harassment and females' stress of interpersonal relationship at work;(4)Female employees' harmony tendency moderates the positive relationship between female employee' anxiety and their stress of interpersonal relationship at work.Such relationship is more pronounced when the level of harmony tendency is high rather than low.(5)Female employees' harmony tendency moderates the positive relationship between workplace sexual harassment and their stress of interpersonal relationship at work via anxiety.Compared to female employees with low harmony tendency,such relationship was more pronounced for those with high harmony tendency.