Workplace sexual harassment : exploring the experience of tour leaders in an Asian context

Abstract

Sexual harassment is a prominent issue in the workplace; it presents a particular challenge with regard to this sensitive area in the Asian context due to the Asian cultural value. Tour leaders are one of the main components of the tourism industry workforce and are expensive to train in terms of both time/experience accumulation and financial investment. The potential risk of sexual harassment in the hospitality and tourism workplace remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to investigate tour leaders’ experiences of sexual harassment at work and their awareness of the organizational polices/regulations relating to sexual harassment in the workplace. A survey was conducted on the tour leaders in Taiwan and results of the study suggested that gender sexual harassment and seductive harassment behaviour were found to occur more frequently than sexual bribery, sexual coercion and sexual assault. Asian tours leaders tend to adopt extremely passive coping strategies in dealing with sexual harassment incidents. More than half of the tour leaders in the current study were ‘unsure’ whether their affiliated travel agencies had a sexual harassment policy.