Managing Workplace Sexual Harassment: The Role of Training Diversity, Quantity, and Recency

Sexual harassment remains a persistent problem for business organizations. Case law, especially that emanating from the Supreme Court, makes it management’s responsibility to implement programs reasonably calculated to prevent harassment, or else face heightened liability. A common element often found in these preventative programs includes some form of harassment training. Indeed, several states have gone so far as to mandate sexual harassment training. Despite this, little research exists to demonstrate the efficacy of sexual harassment training programs. Further, no research has indicated that training equips managers with the ability to respond with an appropriate action. The following study addresses this issue by examining whether training diversity (i.e., number of training methods), training quantity (i.e., cumulative training hours), and training recency (i.e., elapsed time since training) predict one’s ability to (a) correctly identify instances of sexual harassment and (b) take an appropriate action. Results suggest that individual difference variables unrelated to training predict one’s ability to correctly identify sexual harassment. Training diversity, quantity, and recency add incremental variance to this prediction. No such relationship was found among these predictor variables and one’s ability to take an appropriate action. Implications concerning these results are offered along with directions for future research.