Workplace Harassment Risk: What Research Reveals About the 5 Dimensions of Risk — Including the One Most Managers Overlook

Most managers understand harassment risk in one direction: behaviors that are too aggressive, too forceful, or too careless about other people's dignity and wellbeing.

What the research also documents is a second direction of risk — one that has become increasingly prevalent as awareness of harassment has grown.

It's the risk of the manager who stops giving difficult feedback because they're afraid of being accused, who avoids one-on-one conversations with certain team members to prevent misunderstanding, who witnesses a problem and says nothing because saying something feels dangerous.

Both directions produce genuine harm. The first creates environments where people feel threatened or unsafe. The second creates environments where people lack the guidance and honest engagement they need to grow — and where problems accumulate unseen.

The CommStyle Harassment Risk Self-Assessment measures both.

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The Legal and Social Context

In June 2020, Japan's Power Harassment Prevention Act came into effect, mandating that employers take preventive measures against power harassment, with obligations extended to small and medium-sized enterprises from April 2022.^[2] Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare guidelines define six types of power harassment: physical assault, psychological attack, isolation, over-demand, under-demand, and invasion of privacy.

Similar frameworks govern sexual harassment and maternity harassment.^[1] The legal framework creates both a compliance obligation and a reputational imperative.

Research from harassment prevention programs consistently identifies a specific challenge: most managers who complete awareness training can accurately describe what harassment is.

What they're less able to do is accurately assess whether their own behavior — in specific situations, under specific pressures — crosses or approaches the lines they've learned to identify.

This isn't a knowledge problem — it's a self-awareness problem, which is exactly what structured self-assessment is designed to address.

Dimension ①: Legal Compliance Risk

This dimension addresses the most directly regulated forms of harassment: power, sexual, and maternity harassment.

Power harassment behaviors include repeated conduct that exceeds what's necessary in business, taking advantage of superior rank, and causing a difficult work environment — verbal abuse, humiliation in front of others, and unreasonable demands.

Sexual harassment encompasses unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature that creates a hostile environment, including comments about appearance or sexual jokes the recipient doesn't welcome.

Maternity harassment includes negative conduct toward employees who are pregnant or managing childcare responsibilities.

Research on how these behaviors occur in practice consistently finds most incidents don't involve deliberate malice — they involve the cumulative effect of behaviors the perpetrator experiences as minor or justified, and that the recipient experiences very differently.

The assessment probes behaviors rather than intentions, consistent with how harassment is legally assessed: impact, not intent, determines whether conduct is harassing.

Dimensions ②③: Work Management and Communication Risk

Work Management Risk examines how practices around goal-setting, workload, and support can create harassment risk without any obviously aggressive behavior.

The Job Demands-Resources Model documents that high job demands combined with insufficient resources produces burnout and deteriorating interpersonal dynamics — even when no explicitly harassing behavior occurs.^[3] Harassment via management practice is often invisible to the perpetrator because it looks like normal performance management.

Communication Risk examines how the quality of day-to-day communication creates or undermines psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson's research established that team environments where people feel safe to speak are fundamentally different from those where they don't, in performance, learning, and retention.^[4] Three behaviors create the highest risk here: rapport deficit (task-focused interaction with no "trust reserve," so firm feedback lands as hostile), mood expression (a consistently irritable manager creates ambient threat regardless of specific statements), and anger expression (raised voice or harsh tone, the most proximate precursor to psychological attack).

Dimension ④: Self-Control Risk

This dimension is distinctively internal — it examines the psychological conditions within the manager that create risk for externally harassing behavior.

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence framework identified self-awareness and self-regulation as foundational capacities determining interpersonal behavior quality.^[5] Research on harassment perpetration consistently finds emotional dysregulation among the strongest internal risk factors.

Three patterns are assessed: emotional self-awareness deficit (not noticing irritability until it's already expressed in behavior), perfectionism and rigid thinking (a belief in one correct way of doing things, driving excessive criticism), and stress tolerance and self-care (depleted personal resources reducing regulatory capacity for managing emotional expression).

Dimension ⑤: Over-Avoidance Risk (Independent)

This dimension is structurally different from the first four and is assessed independently. It describes the pattern where awareness of harassment risk leads to excessive withdrawal from the management behaviors subordinates need: feedback, correction, and direct communication.

Morrison and Milliken's research on organizational silence identified a pattern where people systematically withhold information, opinions, and concerns — not from indifference but from fear of consequences.^[6]

Over-avoidance risk is assessed independently because it's directionally opposite to the other four — Dimensions ①–④ measure behaviors that are too much, while Dimension ⑤ measures behaviors that are too little.

Combining them into a single score would obscure meaningful patterns; a manager high on aggression and one high on avoidance require completely different development responses.

How the Assessment Is Designed

Unlike the Retention Power Assessment where higher scores are better, higher scores on this assessment indicate higher risk.

The scoring is calibrated conservatively — even "neither agree nor disagree" responses generate points, reflecting the principle that ambivalence about risk-adjacent behaviors warrants attention.

Dimensions ①–④ combined (36 questions, maximum 144 points): 0–16 is low risk, 17–44 is slightly elevated, 45–80 is high risk, and 81–144 is very high risk requiring urgent attention.

Dimension ⑤ independent (9 questions, maximum 36 points): 0–3 is low risk, 4–15 is slightly elevated, and 16–36 is high risk.

Why Self-Assessment Matters

Survey research finds only about half of employees who experience harassment report it formally,^[8] which is part of why formal harassment prevention alone is insufficient.

Formal harassment prevention typically relies on policy, training, and complaint processes — each important, and each addressing harassment that has already occurred or is occurring at a level someone is willing to report.

Self-assessment addresses a different point in the process: the behavioral patterns that precede formal incidents, that are too diffuse to report, and that managers themselves are often unaware of.

Research on harassment prevention consistently finds structured self-reflection among the most effective individual-level interventions, because it develops the metacognitive awareness that allows behavior to be observed and adjusted before it reaches harmful levels.

→ Take the free CommStyle Assessment

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this assessment the same as a legal harassment evaluation?

No. This is a self-assessment tool for behavioral self-reflection and development. It's not a legal assessment of whether specific conduct constitutes harassment, and it can't be used as the basis for disciplinary or legal decisions.

For specific legal questions, consultation with a qualified employment lawyer or HR professional is appropriate.

What does it mean if my score is high on Dimension ⑤ but low on ①–④?

This pattern describes a manager highly conscious of harassment concerns who has responded by withdrawing from management behaviors subordinates need. This is a common, underrecognized management problem.

The response isn't less awareness but different skills — specifically, assertive communication techniques^[7] that allow direct, honest feedback without creating harassment risk.

My score is high in one dimension but not others. What should I focus on?

Address the highest-scoring dimension first.

Each has a distinct behavioral profile requiring a different development approach — a high score on Legal Compliance Risk primarily requires behavioral change in specific interaction types, while a high score on Self-Control Risk primarily requires metacognitive and stress management development.