The effect of nonverbal behaviors associated with sexual harassment proclivity on women's performance

We explored whether exposure to nonverbal behaviors that mirror those used by men with sexual harassment proclivity (i.e., high dominance and/or high sociosexual nonverbal behaviors) leads women to perceive those men as potential sexual harassers and lowers women's actual performance on the job. In our first experiment, women's performance was negatively affected when they interacted with a task administrator enacting dominant nonverbal behaviors. The women also perceived the dominant task administrator as more sexual. In our second experiment, viewers rated the task administrator enacting dominant nonverbal behaviors as more likely than the less dominant task administrator to show gender-based attention, social attention, and sexually harassing behaviors. Taken together, our findings suggest an association between perceptions of dominance and sexuality. KEY WORDS: sexual harassment; dominance; nonverbal behavior.