8.1 (Dougherty and Smythe 2004)

Culture of sexual harassment (i.e., Some cultures are more prone to sexual harassment than others).

From the perspective of sensemaking theory, organizational members make sense of unexpected events through a process of action, selection and interpretation (Weick 1995).

Organizational culture is created not through shared meaning, but shared experiences through processes sensemaking. We might never come to a consensus, but the process of sensemaking can help us have shared experiences.

Properties of sensemaking:

  • Identity: created through the interaction with other organizational members.
  • Retrospective: make sense only looking backward.
  • Ongoing: relate past, present, and future to make sense of an event.
  • Enactment: actors are part of the culture.
  • Extracted cues: focus their attention to parts of the environment.
  • Social: based on either interaction with others, or expected interaction with others.
  • Plausibility: seems reasonable.

Hence, sensemaking influence

  • the acceptance of sexual harassment in an organization
  • responses by nonharassed members.

Sensemaking’s phases:

  • Discovery
  • Debriefing (e.g., humor, ridicule in case of sexual harassment)
  • Dispersal (e.g., return to normalcy)

men and women make of sexual harassment differently (i.e., women label more behavior as sexual harassment than men)

Practical Applications

  • Applying Humor: humor can help members involve actively in sharing sexual harassment training, sense of community. But too much can also belittle victim’s experience.
  • White men and sexual harassment: should to vilify, but assume that they want to help.
  • Identifying Sexual harassment: should not focus on shared meaning, but shared experience.
  • Responding to sexual harassment: no one-size-fit-all approach, but respect contexts of the sexual harassment.

References

Dougherty, Debbie, and Mary Jeanette Smythe. 2004. “Sensemaking, Organizational Culture, and Sexual Harassment.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 32 (4): 293–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090988042000275998.

Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.