Boersma, Kees

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Organization Management Journal Volume 12 Issue 4 Article 7 10-2-2015 An Alternative to the Strictly Legal Approach on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Giving Voices to Values Kees Boersma VU University Amsterdam Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/omj  Part of the Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, and the Organizational Communication Commons Recommended Citation Boersma, Kees (2015) "An Alternative to the Strictly Legal Approach on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Giving Voices to Values," Organization Management Journal: Vol. 12: Iss. 4, Article 7. Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/omj/vol12/iss4/7 Organization Management Journal, 12: 235, 2015Copyright © Eastern Academy of ManagementISSN: 1541-6518 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15416518.2015.1115227LINKING THEORY & PRACTICEAn Alternative to the Strictly Legal Approach on SexualHarassment in the Workplace: Giving Voices to ValuesKees Boersma1Co-Editor1Department of Organization Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsThis Linking Theory & Practice section contains an interest-ing article on organizational responses to sexual harassment.Although the legal environment so far hasn’t found an adequateanswer to the ways in which organizations address the prob-lem of sexual harassment, the authors of the piece “ImprovingOrganizational Responses to Sexual Harassment Using theGiving Voice to Values Approach,” Stacie F. Chappell and LynnBowes-Sperry, ask attention for a new perspective based onorganizational ethics. Their article draws on the Giving Voice toValues (GVV) approach pioneered by Mary Gentile and writtenabout by her in this journal in 2012. Gentile’s (2012) GVV doesnot by any means restrict itself to sexual harassment issues, butin their article in this issue, the authors utilize it to help maketheir points regarding the limitations of current training as itis commonly presented in many corporate and organizationalsettings.Thus, the authors contend here that the main problem withthe legal approach to dealing with sexual harassment on theorganizational level is that the focus is on the implementationof organizational “solutions,” such as training focusing on def-inition, policies, procedures, and legalities. Paradoxically, thisresults in protecting the already more powerful worker insteadof protecting the less powerful. The legal procedures can bea threshold for those who want to discuss certain behaviorsAddress correspondence to Kees Boersma, Departmentof Organization Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, DeBoelelaan 1081c, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail:f.k.boersma@vu.nlat work that they label as sexual harassment. In other words,they might consider some behavior to be inappropriate but fearthat they have misinterpreted the witnessed behavior and/orthat it would not hold against legal definitions. This results ina Catch 22 situation in which the question of whether or notsexual harassment in the workplace exists is related to the legalstructures that are part of the same power structures one wantsto discuss. To overcome this paradox, the authors advocatethe action-oriented approach labeled Giving Voice to Values(GVV). The GVV is a curriculum-based approach that hopes toenable a person’s ability to recognize, learn, and give voice tomoral values. Stacie F. Chappell and Lynn Bowes-Sperry con-vincingly show that this approach not only offers an alternativeto the legal approach, but in fact expands the options to addresssexual harassment in multiple ways. While sexual harassmentin the workplace is still a pervasive problem, this is a contribu-tion that will set the agenda for a more open dialogue on thissensitive issue.REFERENCEGentile, M. C. (2012). Values-driven leadership development: Where we havebeen and where we could go. Organization Management Journal, 9(3),188–196. doi:10.1080/15416518.2012.708854235

An Alternative to the Strictly Legal Approach on Sexual
Harassment in the Workplace: Giving Voices to Values

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An Alternative to the Strictly Legal Approach on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Giving Voices to Values

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