#MeToo, Covid-19 and the new workplace: re-examining institutional discrimination's impact on workplace harassment of expatriates following two exogenous shocks

Abstract

Purpose

Replication is essential to science for the purpose of (1) updating previously accepted knowledge and (2) testing the boundary conditions of this knowledge. Although Bader et al.’s (2018) impactful paper on gender harassment experienced by expatriates was only published five years ago, there have been two relevant exogenous shocks to the environment since they collected their data, making this study an excellent target for replication.

Design/methodology/approach

Three-hundred ninety-one expatriates who were currently working in 79 different countries completed an electronic survey that included scales for gender harassment, ethnicity harassment, general stress, frustration and job satisfaction. Data were analyzed using partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in Stata17.

Findings

Consistent with prior research, gender had a significant relationship with workplace gender harassment (ß = 0.228, p < 0.001) such that males experienced lower levels of harassment than other expatriates. The relationship between race/ethnicity and experiences of ethnicity harassment was dependent upon model specification. Workplace harassment had a negative relationship with job satisfaction (gender harassment, ß = −0.114, p = 0.030; ethnicity harassment; ß = −0.146, p = 0.002) and a positive relationship with frustration (gender harassment, ß = 0.231, p < 0.001; ethnicity harassment, ß = 0.213, p < 0.001).

Originality/value

Using a larger, more diverse sample than that used in prior research, the authors were able to test the generalizability of accepted knowledge. While the authors replicated many findings identified in prior research, they failed to replicate the effects pertaining to the relationship between macro-level variables and experiences of harassment. Given that macro-level variables play a key role in status construction theory (SCT), this research raises important questions for future work.

Citation

Obenauer, W. and Rezaei, S. (2023), "#MeToo, Covid-19 and the new workplace: re-examining institutional discrimination's impact on workplace harassment of expatriates following two exogenous shocks", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 411-436. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-10-2022-0053