The role of power in sexual harassment as a counterproductive behavior in organizations

We present sexual harassment (SH) as a counterproductive behavior and show how revealing the role of power as an underlying motive in SH and other counterproductive work behavior (CWB) incidents may help us to more fully understand these negative phenomena. We offer a model explicating the role of power in SH based on French and Ravenʹs (French, J. R. & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In Cartwright, D. (Ed.), Studies in social power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Institute of Social Research) description of sources of power, and expanded to include individual, organizational, and societal levels of such influences. Specifically, we propose that: 1) Recognizing the various bases of power can help identify and rectify power issues in SH, as well as in other CWB incidents; 2) SH and related CWBs are symptoms of a culture of power issues (including abuse) in the organization.