Summary This review focuses on the disclosure decisions faced by employees with concealable stigmatized identities—one of the most challenging decisions these individuals must make on a day‐to‐day basis. Indeed, multiple theoretical frameworks have provided a foundation for understanding the antecedents and outcomes associated with the decision to disclose or not to disclose a stigmatized identity. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which these frameworks have been empirically supported. This systematic review serves to unify the extant literature and prompt continued research related to employees with concealable stigmatized identities. Specifically, we draw upon multiple fields of study, including applied psychology, management, social psychology, and occupational health as a means to systematically synthesize the existing empirical research related to disclosure of stigmatized identities at work. In addition to advancing the scholarly knowledge of disclosure, this review also provides practical utility to organizations as they continue to create work environments that foster inclusion of all stigmatized and nonstigmatized employees.

Business and management conceptualizations of sexual harassment have been informed by both legal and psychological definitions. From the psychological perspective, sexual harassment behaviors include harassment based on one’s gender, enacting unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. The most recent psychological theories of sexual harassment acknowledge that it is a gendered experience motivated by the societal stratification of gender and not by sexual gratification. Harassing behaviors negatively impact individual well-being. Well-documented workplace effects of sexual harassment include reduced job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and productivity, and increased job stress, turnover, withdrawal, and conflict. Sexual harassment negatively affects target’s psychological and physical well-being, including increases in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms, emotional exhaustion, headaches, sleep problems, gastric distress, and upper respiratory problems. All of these individual-level effects can result in financial decrements for the target and the organization. Both individual and organizational factors predict sexual harassment. Women are more likely to experience sexual harassment, as well as minoritized persons, with women who embody more than one minority identity being the most likely to experience sexual harassment. This finding supports the interpretation of sexual harassment as motivated by reinforcing societal power hierarchies. Other individual factors such as sexual orientation, age, education level, and marital status are also related to experiencing sexual harassment. At the organizational level, organizational climate, job-gender context, and relative power between the harasser and the target predict sexual harassment. Organizational climates that are more tolerant of sexual harassment produce more sexual harassment. In addition, as masculinity of a work context increases, so does sexual harassment for women. Lastly, those with lower organizational power are more likely to experience sexual harassment, particularly by people with higher levels of power; however, contrapower harassment (harassment of individuals with higher organizational power by those with lower organizational power) can also occur. Reporting harassment to organizational authorities has been theorized to lead to positive outcomes, but reporting rates are low. This may reflect findings that procedures for reporting are often unclear and that reporting often leads to worse outcomes for targets of harassment than their non-reporting peers. The two most common approaches to measuring sexual harassment are direct query (explicitly ask about sexual harassment) or behavior experiences (ask respondents about how many sexually harassing behaviors they have experienced). A few considerations for the methodology used in these studies include inconsistency in conceptual or operational definitions of sexual harassment, the framing of a study, the retrospective nature of research asking about past experiences, and the sampling methodology used. A number of gaps remain in the documentation and understanding of sexual harassment phenomena, which intersect with some research practices and challenges. These include (a) the need to take into account factors other than incidence rates, such as perceived severity of experiences; (b) further examination of how multiple minority statuses and intersectional oppression affect harassment; (c) the importance of conducting research on harassment perpetrators; and (d) the examination of culturally informed topics related to sexual harassment, particularly outside Western countries.

ObjectivesThe #MeToo social media campaign raised awareness about sexual harassment. The purpose of the current study was to address three unexplored research questions. First, what factors influenced whether a person posted #MeToo? Second, how did posting (or not) influence participants' wellbeing? Finally, what motivated participants' posting (or not) #MeToo?MethodThis mixed-methods study explores how #MeToo was experienced by full-time employees (N = 395) who could have posted #MeToo (i.e., experienced a sexual harassment event), whether or not they did so. Participants completed surveys in July of 2018 assessing social media use, sexual harassment history, relational variables such as relative power and social support, and job and life satisfaction. Participants also responded to open-ended survey questions about the context of and decisions about #MeToo posting.ResultsQuantitative results indicated that sexual harassment history was the most powerful predictor of #MeToo posting, while power and interpersonal contact also contributed. Qualitative analyses (N = 74) using a grounded theory approach indicated themes associated with decisions to disclose, including feeling a responsibility to post, need for support, and affective benefits. Decisions not to disclose were event-related negative affect, posting-related negative affect, timing of the event, fit with the #MeToo movement, privacy concerns, and fear of consequences.ConclusionThis study contributes to the literature on sexual harassment disclosure by focusing on informal means of disclosure and drawing on comparisons to formal reporting and implications for workplaces. Online sexual harassment disclosure, in many ways, reflects the impediments to formal reporting procedures. Given the increased use of social media for purposes of disclosure, these findings suggests that organizations should recognize the legitimacy of sexual harassment reports made online and consider the possible failings of their formal reporting systems as reasons for online disclosure.

No abstract