Outcomes of Federal Court Decisions on Sexual Harassment

Penalty Standards for Sexual Harassment Offences in Unionized Workplaces

“…These findings are roughly similar to those of Terpstra and Baker (1992) who investigated the outcomes of 133 Fair Employment Practices cases heard in U.S. federal courts involving sexual harassment. They found that victims' chances of winning were increased where the harassment was severe, where there were witnesses and supporting documents, and where their employer took no action on behalf of the victim.…”

“…Cases were categorized in terms of the most serious offence, which was the major focus in the arbitration hearing. These offence categories were preferred to those utilized in previous research where a single case might be categorized into more than one category (Coles 1989), the categories might not be ordered consistently in terms of seriousness of offence (Terpstra and Cook 1986), or the categories reduced to two (severe/not severe) (Terpstra and Baker 1992).…”

Sexual Harassers: Behaviors, Motives, and Change Over Time

“…Published arbitration decisions have been used as a data source for research purposes in other studies of aggressive workplace behaviors including verbal or physical assaults on supervisors (Allen & Lucero, 1996;Jennings, 1974), employees fighting (Adams, Davis, & Jennings, 1988), and sexual harassment . In a related line of research, state agency case reports (Terpstra & Baker, 1988) and court decisions (Paetzold & O'Leary-Kelly, 1996;Terpstra & Baker, 1992) were utilized as a data source to examine sexual harassment.…”

Subordinate Aggression Against Managers: Empirical Analyses of Published Arbitration Decisions

“…However, decisions issued in other venues have been used to study aggressive workplace behavior. For example, case reports prepared by a state agency (Terpstra & Baker, 1988) and federal court decisions (Terpstra & Baker, 1992) have been used to study sexual harassment, a form of personal aggression as defined by Robinson and Bennett (1995).…”

“…An approach similar to the one employed by Terpstra and Baker (1992) was used to code the data. Once cases involving verbal and physical assaults on managers were identified through the Labor Arbitration Reports indexing system, all relevant decisions were duplicated and subjected to content analysis.…”