How Signals of Silence Sustain Sexual Harassment and What to Do About It

Abstract

Sexual harassment has persisted for decades as an open secret within organizations, creating an ongoing challenge for Human Resource practitioners. Many employees experience or witness harassment yet say nothing. When they contemplate complaining, they are discouraged from doing so. Some still muster the courage to speak out about these abuses, but find their complaints ignored, downplayed, or dismissed by those in charge. Building on prior research, we propose that these practices add up to signals of silence, which we conceptualize and empirically operationalize. Drawing on social information processing theory, we explicate how these signals help sustain and perpetuate sexual harassment. We further argue that supervisors can counteract these harmful signals of silence by modeling ethical leadership. We investigated these ideas with two sets of studies comprising seven independent samples. In Study 1 ( N total = 2649 participants), Phases 1 through 5, we developed and validated a higher‐order aggregate measure of harassment signals of silence (Harassment SOS scale) comprising three interrelated elements: being silent, silencing others, and not listening. In Study 2 ( N total = 1111 participants), we used field samples collected from two North American police departments to test the relationship between signals of silence and experiences of harassment, along with the role of ethical supervision in mitigating the harmful effects of silence. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice, including the implementation of relevant HR policies and practices.