A Qualitative Study Exploring Senior Leaders’ Experiences and Perceptions in Addressing Workplace Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Federal Government: A Systems Perspective

Sexual harassment (SH) is a prevalent, costly, and often unreported problem in the U.S. Federal Government. Despite decades of research from multiple perspectives and recommendations to address SH, the problem persists and remains complex. While some researchers and U.S. Government agencies have called upon leaders to commit to eliminating workplace SH, others have suggested using an integrated conflict management system (ICMS) to manage the complexity, nuances, and conflicts. Even though there is a call for leadership to address SH, there is limited documentation in the literature about leaders’ experiences and perceptions in addressing the problem. Therefore, this qualitative study was designed to explore leaders’ experiences and perceptions of addressing workplace SH and identify whether organizational approaches used to address workplace SH in the Executive Branch aligned with an ICMS. Using a constructivist paradigm, 90-minute individual interviews were conducted with nine participants, current and former U.S. Federal Government Executive Branch in various senior leadership positions. Conducting semistructured interviews was not intended to evaluate individual leader effectiveness; rather, participants were encouraged to provide candid responses to open-ended questions to elicit leadership experiences and perceptions about organizational approaches such as policies, processes, and practices to inform a systems approach. The key findings indicate that senior leaders recognize the complexity of SH and are frustrated with the barriers and challenges that hinder disclosing, reporting, and addressing workplace SH. Additionally, the findings showed that the organizational approaches used to address workplace SH in the Executive Branch at the of the study were not aligned with an ICMS and instead were heavily focused on mitigating agency liability, which is antithetical to managing the nuances of workplace SH and associated conflicts. The findings suggest that any goal aimed to eliminate workplace SH in the Executive Branch should be shifted to a more realistic and obtainable objective consistent with addressing complex problems such as designing a holistic system that can help leaders manage the complexity of the problem, the nuances, and associated conflicts while simultaneously balancing individual needs and organizational interests.