Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Feeling powerful or possessing power over someone is often shown in the sexual harassment literature as an antecedent. Indeed, power can be construed in a self-focused manner or in a responsibility-focused manner. Tost (2015) theorized that powerholders who construe their power as responsibility should then act for the benefit of others. However, a recent study by Stockdale, Gilmer, and Dinh (2019) found the opposite effect. Specifically, they found that priming responsibility-focused power increased the intention to sexually harass, speculating that priming such powers may have created a “moral license” (Miller & Effron, 2010) to engage in sexual harassment. The purpose of the present study is to extend their findings by examining the role of moral licensing. I hypothesize that participants who are in the responsibility-focused power priming condition will engage in sexual harassment proclivities through a serial mediation of communal feelings and moral licensing (moral crediting and moral credentialing). Results confirm that communal feelings and moral crediting serially mediate the relationship between responsibility-focused power and sexual harassment proclivities. The hypothesized role of moral credentialing was not supported. Findings in this study provides a potential explanation for the paradoxical findings of responsibility-focused power in Stockdale et al. (2019)’s study. This study also emphasizes the importance of understanding responsibility-focused power in sexual harassment indices and the potential the ironic effects of having such power via moral crediting.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/24276 |
| Date | 10 1900 |
| Creators | Dinh, Tuyen K. |
| Contributors | Stockdale, Margaret S., Ashburn-Nardo, Leslie, Salyers, Michelle P. |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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