Efforts to end sexual harassment that rely primarily on target reporting are unlikely to be successful because most targets do not report their experiences. Thus, we explore an alternative mechanism for controlling sexual harassment-observer intervention. We examine observer intervention in sexual harassment using the literature on bystander intervention for guidance. We describe the concept of observer intervention, develop a taxonomy of intervention types, and discuss factors promoting and inhibiting its occurrence.

This review examines research addressing workplace sexual harassment (SH) since the last major review in a management journal in 1995. The authors examine several aspects of recent research: current definitions, labeling of SH, antecedents to SH, responses to SH, and consequences resulting from SH. They then make suggestions for future research, using research on workplace aggression as a framework.

This paper is the first to explore the impact of culture on the acceptability of workplace bullying and to do so across a wide range of countries. Physically intimidating bullying is less acceptable than work related bullying both within groups of similar cultures and globally. Cultures with high performance orientation find bullying to be more acceptable while those with high future orientation find bullying to be less acceptable. A high humane orientation is associated with finding work related bullying to be less acceptable. Confucian Asia finds work-related bullying to be more acceptable than the Anglo, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa country clusters and finds physically intimidating bullying to be more acceptable than the Anglo and Latin America country clusters. The differences in the acceptability of bullying with respect to these cultures are partially explained in terms of cultural dimensions.