Are They True to the Cause? Beliefs About Organizational and Unit Commitment to Sexual Harassment Awareness Training

Abstract

Sexual harassment awareness training is crucial for both legal defensibility purposes and for creating a psychologically safe environment for employees. Using a pretest/posttest design in an organizational setting, this study examined the simple and interactive effects of two individual perceptions toward the training context—cynicism toward organizational harassment change and perceived unit ethical climate—on posttraining knowledge and myth-based attitudes regarding sexual harassment. With the exception of a marginally significant effect of cynicism on posttraining knowledge, the outcomes were largely unaffected by either of the predictors, individually. However, cynicism toward organizational harassment change and perceived unit ethical climate interacted to predict both outcomes, such that training outcomes particularly suffer when individuals are cynical toward organizational change and perceive the work group as unethical. This underscores the importance of consideration of both organizational and work group levels of context simultaneously, in evaluating effectiveness, as well as the need for the organization to communicate a congruent harassment-free workplace message at both the unit and organizational levels. In addition, we examined the mediating role of motivation to learn on these relationships but found no evidence of indirect effects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.