A 24-year-old female employee landed her first career job at Exeter Group only a few months after graduating from university. The employee worked as an assistant to the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. A few months after the employee began her new job, her boss began making work requests that seemed personal and then began making repeated sexual advances, which made the employee feel increasingly uncomfortable. The employee tried to curb the boss’s behaviour on several occasions, but she felt caught between dealing with harassment from her boss and trying to develop her career.
One late evening during a business trip, the boss drunkenly and forcibly disrupted the employee in her hotel room and attempted to coerce her into having sex with him. The employee evaded the advance by locking herself in the bathroom of her hotel room. As she sat on the floor of the bathroom, she wondered how she had found herself in this extremely difficult situation and how she would get out of it.
The case asks students to assume the employee’s perspective to experience how problematic and ambiguous it can be for targets of harassment, even when the situation is clear to outside observers. The level of analytical difficulty in the case is moderate. The key challenge for students is to recognize that harassment experiences place targets in tense dilemmas. Solutions to these dilemmas are not simple because of potential trade-offs, such as confronting the harassment versus advancing one’s career. Students are also asked to develop comprehensive, concrete, and feasible solutions about next steps that the employee can take. The case is mainly intended for master’s level courses in business schools and social science programs. It is also suitable for advanced undergraduate-level courses and can be used in workshops. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to achieve the following:
- Vicariously experience the psychological and behavioural tensions that an employee who is exposed to harassment experiences.
- Learn about the costs of harassment for its targets.
- Recognize the power dynamics in harassment situations and the increasing entrapment of targets of harassment over time.
- Prepare for harassment situations by suggesting what options the employee has.
For more information, see https://www.iveypublishing.ca/s/product/susan-taylor-at-exeter-group/01t5c00000D623t. A teaching note is separately available.