Impact Podcast | When does “just joking” become workplace harassment?

KANINA BLANCHARD: Exclusive insights, actionable strategies and ideas that ignite change.
You're listening to the Ivey Impact Podcast from Ivey Business School.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Hello and welcome to Dialogue with the Dean, the flagship series on the Ivey Impact Podcast. I'm Julian Birkinshaw, Dean of the Ivey Business School, and in this series, I speak with Ivey's leading faculty to explore the research shaping business and society today. On this episode, we turn to an issue that remains as urgent as it is complex: sexual harassment in the workplace.

While public conversation may indicate progress, the data tells another story. In response to this pervasive issue, many organizations turn to training programs. But do these programs truly make workplaces safer and more respectful, or are they just ticking a box? To explore this, I'm joined by Shannon Rawski, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Ivey. Together, we'll examine the realities of workplace sexual harassment, what effective training requires, and key lessons from her new book on the #MeToo movement. Shannon, welcome to Dialogue with the Dean. It's wonderful to have you here.

SHANNON RAWSKI: Thank you so much for having me. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, let's just ask you a little bit about your journey. What brought you to Ivey?

SHANNON RAWKSI: Well, Ivey is my second academic job in my career. And what really drew me to Ivey is a passion for both teaching and research. Ivey is unique amongst other academic institutions in that we have a real culture of excellence for both research and teaching.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Got it. And of course, your own research as we're going to get into on sexual harassment. Let's kick that off. What got you interested in that as a topic? 

SHANNON RAWSKI: My interest really started back all the way back in my undergraduate years. I was doing an undergraduate research assistantship in the industrial organizational psych department of Bowling Green State University. And, in working with the faculty and the graduate students, I developed an interest in psychology in the workplace. If you think about it, most people spend a lot of their adult life at work. So if we can make it better for people at work, that can really impact a lot of people's lives. So I decided to study sexual harassment in the hopes of making the workplace better for a lot of people.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And, of course, sexual harassment is both an important but difficult subject to study, I suspect. I mean, we're going to get into that. And from what you were saying earlier, you're one of relatively few people who's actually studying sexual harassment in the workplace?

SHANNON RAWSKI: Well, there's a growing community of scholars who study sexual harassment in the workplace.

When I was writing my dissertation research on sexual harassment training, there were only about seven peer reviewed studies on the topic. And shortly thereafter, the MeToo movement started in 2017. So since then, interest has grown and we are really trying to cultivate a community of scholars that collaborate and work together to build a body of research to make some progress on this issue.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So we're going to dive into a couple of your studies, and we're going to get a little bit theoretical. I mean, not very, but a little bit theoretical as a means of helping the listeners to understand what this looks like, sort of in the complexities of the workplace, so that we can make better recommendations as to what they might do differently.

So you have a paper published in the Academy of Management Review. For listeners, this is the top academic journal in the field. "It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt." Give us a sense of what that paper is all about. I mean, I know it's a theoretical paper, but just give us a flavor for what you're trying to sort of make sense of in that paper.

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. It is complex, but I find that when you dig into the complexities, sometimes things make more sense than when we oversimplify. So that paper is really about how the same exact behaviors can be framed as either playful joking around or sexual harassment, depending on how the people and the context create meaning around what those behaviors really represent.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And can you give us an example?

SHANNON RAWSKI: I mean, sure, so take something a little bit ambiguous, like sexual joking in the workplace. Of course it happens. However, it can be taken as something quite offensive. Maybe even threatening, especially to women in the workplace. Or it can be taken as a way to signal camaraderie that you're in the in-group that we're blowing off steam, relieving stress from the workplace.
So both those meetings can happen, and it all depends on how the people in the situation negotiate with each other for what those behaviors really mean. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Okay. So let me make sure I understood this. So it goes without saying that that each of us has our own interpretation of something. And, and we know that definitions of, sexist behavior or whatever, in the eye of the beholder. I mean, if I claim I'm being harassed, then almost by definition I am.
But I think you're saying something a little bit different, which is not just as an individual. I interpret the world and I make sense of it, and I am offended or not. You're saying there is a sort of a social sense making around what happens in the workplace in terms of dialogue, in terms of behavior, and that there's a collective thing as well as an individual thing.

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. So you're right that in our own minds, we all have our own standard and definition for what we think sexual harassment is, but it's a group level phenomena that also occurs. For instance, if I want you to take a behaviour as a joke, I might smile, I might tell you, hey, I've got a great joke for you, so you know what to expect. Oftentimes, in these situations, when a sexual joke comes out and I've really primed you to think that it's going to be a joke, you'll laugh before you even think whether or not that joke is offensive because it's so scripted and cued, you know, to laugh on cue.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, help us understand what happens when, you know, I'm a manager, I move into a new group, I see a set of behaviors. I think that's a bit odd. I mean, do I call that out or do I just sort of learn to conform? And that's the essence of what you're saying is that the group has to has to make sense of something. But sometimes behaviors fall outside the norms?

SHANNON RAWSKI:  And herein lies the interesting piece about human play. The goal of play is often to push the boundary of what can be included within play. So imagine a play frame is like a bubble, and that bubble encourages people to try to put more and more behaviors inside the bubble. So the bubble expands to fit those behaviors. So maybe we just start out joking about something benign and someone tells a sexual joke and it takes off from there. Now all of a sudden, the play itself is encouraging more people to tell those kinds of jokes. Maybe those jokes get a little more explicit, and the bubble gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it pops.

Right? And that's when we think about maybe, somebody outside the work group coming in, maybe the HR person, maybe a new manager, maybe a new employee who wasn't included in the initial play where things were a little more benign and they haven't been along that journey of seeing the play expand. So the meaning is new to them, and they think to themselves, oh, wait a minute, this doesn't seem like play to me.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Got it. And we'll get into the kind of the interventions shortly. But let's just finish thinking about how that works. So as you say, the bubble grows. We tolerate, I mean tolerate perhaps isn't the right word, but we come to accept a bunch of these...

SHANNON RAWSKI: Even more than coming to accept it's you do not see these behaviors for any other alternative way they could be explained.

So when you are in a play frame, you are immersed in it, and you do not see how these behaviors could potentially be harassment. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Got it. Right. So, does it take an external person or somebody kind of going, I guess too far that we then have to make sense of, what's going on? I think the paper suggests that that sometimes you actually have to take stock, and you actually have to try to have conversations about what it is that your norms are in order to reset them. Right?

SHANNON RAWSKI: So an external person coming in with their new perspective can help. But oftentimes it's actually the nature of work organizations itself that pops that bubble of play, because you cannot separate play from the inherent hierarchy of a work organization. There are power differentials. And in true social play, powerful actors bring down their power to meet, to meet the level of lower powered actors.

Think about how an older sibling might wrestle with a younger sibling and won't overpower them completely because they're not actually trying to hurt that younger sibling. But we can't do that at work because there is a hierarchy. Managers cannot just give away their title and their formal power because they want to joke around with their subordinates.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Let us jump now to the research that you've been doing on interventions, and perhaps we can start with this paper. I'll just read the title: "Sexual Harassment Training Induced Identity Threats." Again. What are you studying here? You're looking at training around sexual harassment and the reasons why. Perhaps it hasn't worked as well as it might tell us a little bit of the story here.

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. So when I was coming up with my dissertation idea, I knew I want to study something around sexual harassment. And it just so happened my university had announced that everybody in the College of Business had to go to the annual sexual harassment training, and the hallway just became abuzz of people saying, why do I have to go to this? I teach this in my classes. I consulted with HR to put together this training. I shouldn't have to go.

And it just struck me that people seemed rather annoyed or angry to a level that was maybe not reasonable over going to what essentially is a one hour training session once every three years - which was their rule back at the time.

So I was like, that's interesting. Why such a strong reaction against this kind of training?

So I started doing the research on it. And what I determined was that individuals are having what we call an identity threat reaction. And it's really because sexual harassment training, especially your standard compliance based training, only offers two roles to the training audience. You can either be a potential harasser or a potential victim. And that's why you're in this training.
No one wants to be either one of those things.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And so your point is that as an individual about to do a training, I think I'm not a victim and I'm not a harasser. So it's irrelevant to me. 

SHANNON RAWSKI: Right. So people are then not motivated to learn from the training. And they develop what we call backlash, attitudes against the training, meaning they perceive the training as illegitimate. Thus, I don't have to listen to anything in this training session anymore. And then that leads to a willingness and a desire to actually engage in some of the very behaviors that the training is trying to prevent, like more sexual joke telling.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And so what sort of solution do you start to put forward, in terms of doing workplace training better?

SHANNON RAWSKI: Well, if the research says that it's the negative roles offered in training that make people threatened and backlash against it, then the solution must be offering people more positive roles that they can hang on to and exhibit once they leave the training. So we came up with the idea of: let's put all the trainees in a positive role. We'll embed training in a narrative story where the trainee is the hero of the story. 

So we did a follow up study and we tested traditional, compliance based training against this narrative based training and found that the narrative training reduced identity threat and increased some of the training, learning outcomes. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So what does the hero of the story do?

SHANNON RAWSKI: So in the training that we studied at the time, we looked at, the story of a YouTuber who was doing an internship creating content about their internship. And subscribers reached out to that YouTuber saying, hey, I'm in an internship, too, and I've been accused of sexual harassment or I'm being harassed. Can you please help me now? The YouTuber says, I'm not an expert on this, I'm just a YouTuber. But they reach out to experts, a HR professional, a lawyer, a psychologist, and they create content to then share with their followers to help their followers.

So in that way, the learner is motivated to learn to help their subscribers with this issue.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And so you talked about bystander interventions. And then in this language, the bystanders, the person who observes the harassment incident, if you like, then chooses either to get involved or not, which I think is a nice segue. Let's get into it now to all the research you've been doing using VR, virtual reality. And most listeners will have tried these, or at least seen these, headsets that you can strap on that give you an immersive experience. It's one of the many ways in which you're using new technology. And,  I understand that you've been doing some research using this stuff and even using it in the classroom.

We'll get to the classroom bit later, but talk about how you use virtual reality to research and to help people to manage the types of interventions that are needed to address sexual harassment in the workplace. 

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. So one of my initial publications using VR looked at sexual harassment training, where we experimented on the type of practice you engaged in after training, you could either do practice 2D using video on a laptop, or you could do an immersive practice using, 360 degree video in VR.

And essentially you would watch a sexual harassment scenario, and then you'd get to practice different ways of responding to that scenario as a bystander.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And what was the finding? You were saying just before we got started that there was an interesting difference in terms of how the  bystander responded when they watched the 3D experience versus the 2D experience.

SHANNON RAWSKI: So what we found was that in the VR experience, people were much more likely to want to intervene into this situation using informal, non-confrontational types of bystander intervention. So rather than report officially or directly confront the harasser, our VR participants were much more likely to want to interrupt the harassment to pull that target out of the interaction so they were no longer harmed and approach the target of harassment after the fact to offer them social support.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Okay, so let's just go a little bit deeper into that point in terms of the practical things. I'm in a workplace and I see a behaviour which I feel is borderline sexual harassment. I'm not, as we said it, to some degree, it's in the eye of the beholder. I could intervene directly and say, "whoa, what did you just say? That that's completely inappropriate." But, more likely, I'm going to intervene in a slightly more sort of informal way. I might say...

SHANNON RAWSKI:..."excuse me, you've got a call in the conference room." Literally. And just take somebody right out of that interaction to make sure they stay safe, diffuse the company, and then maybe follow up with them after the fact and say, "Hey, I heard what was going on. Were you okay with that? Do you want me to help you? Is there anything I can do to help?" And so some of those more informal, non-confrontational interventions feel safer to people, especially when they were immersed in the VR and the situation felt very real to them.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So it's more true to life practice than what we typically see with a written scenario, or even a video based scenario where most people don't really feel the anxiety of being a bystander and say, oh yeah, of course I would confront the harasser. Of course, if I'm more detached from the event, I'm more likely to believe that I'm going to be tough and directly confront. But actually, you know, these things are complicated and nuanced. 

SHANNON RAWSKI: And, what it might mean, is that if we use VR in our training programs, we need to have people that have lots of opportunities to practice, to build up the skill and maybe even the backbone to confront a harasser.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And now let's just briefly talk about our students. Because, obviously you're not just doing this for academic research. You're also trying to bring virtual reality into the classroom. Can you tell us what you've been doing and how it's been working?

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. So I took some of the lessons learned from my research on VR, and we applied for an Ivey Critical Issues grant and received it to build a simulation specifically for students with their learning objectives in mind. So I currently teach our Leading People in Organizations class for our HBA1 students. That's a class on leadership and teamwork.

So this simulation is about a team experience. And the team is having lots of small conflicts within the span of just a 4 or 5 minute meeting. The really neat thing is you get to watch this team meeting from a neutral third party, sort of invisible perspective, and then once you've seen the whole thing play out, you get to meet one of the characters here a little bit about their backstory and then jump into their shoes.

Now all of a sudden, I'm at their seat at the table. I'm looking at the meeting from their perspective, and I'm noticing things in the meeting that I didn't notice before, including hearing the internal monologue of the character I'm inhabiting. So I'm in real time making sense of how they understand that meeting. What different comments meant to them, what their comments were supposed to mean to others.

And so you can really open up that black box of why is this team dysfunctional? It's because they're not sharing perspectives. Got it.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I've actually tried that little simulation, a bit of it, not the entire thing. And my takeaway was indeed. I mean, it's just a sort of, a reminder that everybody's behaviour is a function of the observed behavior and is a function of many factors, a lot of which are invisible.

And, you know, we  immediately start attributing certain things to those individuals without necessarily putting ourselves in their shoes. And, and that's just a kind of a perpetual reminder that we should have when someone behaves a little bit inappropriately. Let's just try to understand why they're doing that. 

SHANNON RAWSKI: Right. And if teams aren't careful from the get go when they organize and create their team charter, if you don't have a team where members can be vulnerable to each other and have open, free communication, then people hide their vulnerabilities. And it's those vulnerabilities that are sometimes causing a lot of the problems, because people are too afraid to tell you about their struggles and where they're falling short. So they keep them secret, and then it ends up causing conflict down the line.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And I'm going to now hold up the book to audience who are watching rather than just listening.

And the book is called "What the MeToo Movement Highlights and Hides about Workplace Sexual harassment, Spotlights and Shadows." So you're one of the editors of this book. And of course, the MeToo movement, everyone will remember it was 2017, I think. Is that is that correct? 

SHANNON RAWSKI: That's correct. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW:...when that first came to prominence. So tell us a little bit around about this book, why you wrote it. What are the big ideas? 

SHANNON RAWSKI: So I collaborated with my academic advisor from University of Arkansas, back from my PhD program, and we really started this book project with the desire to build a research community in the wake of the MeToo movement. So I think with research topics, the pendulum sort of swings back and forth. There's a hot topic of the time, and then the pendulum swings and it kind of fizzles out.

When I started my research on sexual harassment, sexual harassment training, I would say it had kind of fizzled. And I was one of the few people doing research on sexual harassment training. And then MeToo happened and it was just a boom. We got a lot of young scholars really energized about asking new research questions, making lots of progress.

Our community is growing, and at our conferences we really wanted to do this book to support that community. And now we're seeing even today in 2025, the pendulum seems to be swinging back again. AI is the new hot topic. We have some other anti- diversity and inclusion movements that are happening around the world. And so we don't want to see this research area fizzle out because whether it's viral topic or not, whether it has a hashtag or not, sexual harassment is happening in our work organizations and the research needs to happen.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So the book specifically talks about spotlights and shadows, some things which are prominent, some things which perhaps are remaining hidden. Can you just say a bit more about those spotlights and shadows?

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. So the MeToo movement really put a spotlight on certain issues around sexual harassment, the social movement itself, the role of social media and the role of bystanders. But there were also some other issues hidden in the shadows that also deserve research and attention. So, for instance, the issue of intersectionality, women of colour are much more likely than white women to experience sexual harassment. The role of social class - women in lower social classes and men in lower social classes are more likely to experience sexual harassment. Sexual harassment as trauma in the workplace. Trauma informed perspectives have been big in public health and education. It's just a matter of time before we in business take a trauma informed approach to issues in our workplace.

*INSTRUMENTAL BREAK*

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Good. So we're reaching the end. But I do want to spend quite a significant chunk of time right now on what can we do differently.

And so let me separate out the everyday work of fairly sort of mid to low in the hierarchy from the boss. Let's take the everyday worker. What is your advice to those individuals. They are taking part in meetings. They're taking part in larger forums. They may indeed be victims of sexual harassment themselves. But particularly those who are, shall we say, bystanders in your language, what is your advice to them in terms of how they how they might behave a little bit differently, assuming that, this topic speak?

SHANNON RAWSKI: I would say that any bystander intervention is a brave intervention.

So, of course, depending on the organization you find yourself in, you might have an organization that doesn't have very good reporting systems, where the manager is sweeping things under the rug, where the harasser involved maybe has strong social ties to powerful people. If you're in that situation, just approaching the target after the fact and asking how you can support them, or interrupting so that they're not in an active situation where they're experiencing harm, those are really brave steps in the right direction.

Now, if you find yourself in a powerful position or in an organization that has a low tolerance for sexual harassment, sure, use those reporting systems. Confront the harasser. Strengthen your healthy culture. Because when you see harm being done, when you see something wrong happen and you look the other way, that's you accepting that behavior. And you don't want to deteriorate your healthy culture by allowing those things to happen.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And now, put yourselves in the shoes of the leader of a group of an entire organization, in terms of advice you would give to them? What are the best ways of building an organizational culture that is more aware, alert to, and responsive to these types of issues? 

SHANNON RAWSKI: Well, you definitely have to have the infrastructure. So those reporting systems, those policies in place. But it also has to be a cultural practice. So because people make sense of ambiguous, sexual interactions in the moment, you really have to have a cultural practice of, wait a minute, let's put some boundaries on what we're willing to joke about. Hey, let's debrief and talk about what that situation meant and be okay giving critical feedback to one another.

Because if you sort of grit your teeth and bear it or shy away from confrontation, sometimes you just encourage people to do more of the same. And then the bubble grows until it bursts, right?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: But, there is an inevitable challenge, which I will acknowledge here, because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking this, but if we push too far on this track, we make the workplace sterile. We make it completely devoid of, fun. And I know, I know, you're not advocating that because, you know, you started out our first part of the conversation was all about actually, you know, a norm of play in the workplace is actually healthy. So how do we ensure that all this good advice doesn't kind of go too far? And we actually strip out some of the kind of the collegiality and sociality sociability that makes work enjoyable?

SHANNON RAWSKI: Well, I think we really need to carve out positive roles for people. I think that's key. So don't treat all your employees as though they're helpless victims or potential evil harassers. Treat everybody like they're the hero of the story. And then another thing I think would be, a great leap in the right direction is if we got away from training that told employees how it is and instead facilitated conversation about what are our norms going to be?

Because people are going to joke, people are going to flirt, people are going to share stories about their personal lives. These things are human and they happen in the workplace. What's important is that we give people the skills and the norms to negotiate for what's okay and what's not okay, and how do I raise an issue if something's not okay without being a troublemaker, without making the conflict worse? Can we have those discussions professionally and collegiately?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Now. I mean, in some ways it's the most basic of advice is when you're in any sort of group or team setting, managing the process. In other words, actually reflecting on the dynamic between people and the way in which you are working is vital for a fully effective team.

And I remember learning that at Ivey 35 years ago, and sometimes forgetting it, but  reminding myself that the best way to  make sure that your workplace is effective is periodically to actually reflect on what is, what is acceptable and what is not. 

SHANNON RAWSKI: Absolutely. The teamwork is just as important as the task work.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Indeed. That's actually a pretty good place to stop. So thank you very much.

SHANNON RAWSKI: Thank you for having me.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: You have been listening to Dialogue with the Dean from Ivey Business School. My thanks to Shannon Rawski for sharing her research and insights. And to you, our listeners, for being part of this important conversation.

As we close, it's worth remembering every workplace should be safe, respectful, and free from harassment. If you're experiencing harassment and don't feel comfortable speaking to your manager or H.R. Department, we've included links to support services in the episode guide. Please note that you are not alone and help is available. Until next time, goodbye.

KANINA BLANCHARD: You've been listening to Dialogue with the Dean, an Ivey Impact Podcast series. For more insights from Ivey, including thought leadership on critical issues and additional podcast episodes, visit IveyImpact.ca or subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for tuning in.