Sexual Harassment in the Workplace - Essay Example

Sexual harassment is prevalent in diverse parts of the world, especially in the workplace. The sad thing about it is the thought that victims have little idea that they were already sexually harassed. One reason may be due to cultural orientation (Poulston, 2008). Some may have a different perspective on it (Pierce et al., 2004). This further resulted in the situation in which sexual harassment and its definition have not been fully understood by all. It is therefore important to study this aspect because this can be informative to individuals, especially those who have little information about the abusive capacity of those who can impose power over them. It is also important to understand this because sexual harassment has specific undesirable impacts that can eventually result in inefficient output in the workplace. Thus, workplace harassment is proven to have negative consequences for an individual and organizations (Bowling and Beehr, 2006; Raver and Nishii, 2010; Hershcovis and Barling, 2010). Thus, the human resource department must essentially address this issue to ensure efficient output of the human resource.

The authors were consistent about the purpose of their paper and which is to outline their position on sexual harassment, how to avoid it in the workplace, and the responsibilities of employers to control this kind of situation. There were various sources employed in the paper and these include those with a relevant discussion about the real definition of sexual harassment in the workplace. This makes the paper informative because it tries to inform the readers about the basic forms of sexual harassment in the workplace. Furthermore, more relevant literature was included to justify their points on how to avoid sexual harassment in the workplace, especially on the best part that employers can do to protect human resources. It was also evident in the paper that the authors were able to critically consider various sexual harassment-related incidents. From this standpoint, it was clear how the authors tried to emphasize the relevance and prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace.

The authors concluded that sexual harassment can represent an abuse of power in the workplace. This is one of their strong stands on this issue. It is true that through sexual harassment, everyone has the chance to dominate someone through the imposition of power based on the definition given by the authors. Unfortunately, they failed to expand on this issue. Even though they are suggesting more important and relevant studies on this part, they failed to expand or give a detailed explanation of this aspect. They failed to provide available literature that could support this claim. Primarily, they have imparted logical explanations and some relevant statistics about sexual harassment in the workplace but they failed to emphasize how many of them are eventually caused by abusive use of power over the abused or victims. For instance, they pointed out that women are said to be commonly sexually harassed in the workplace. However, there is no clear justification that this result is evident because women are primarily weak in physical strength than men for instance or the latter is more powerful than the former in the workplace. Furthermore, in general, there are no clear examples of why sexual harassment can represent an abuse of power in certain aspects or different forms. There are basic concerns on this issue that the authors failed to justify in their conclusion that sexual harassment can represent an abuse of power and can take many forms. Many existing studies may support the claims of the authors (Shannon et al., 2007; Rospenda, 2006; Freels et al., 2005; Maillete and Scalora, 2002; Krieger et al., 2008).