Gender harassment against women in the workplace are common and harmful. Bystanders play an important role in curbing gender harassment. In this work, we investigate the impact of a bystander’s level of involvement on other third-party coworkers who are witnesses to a prejudicial attack against women. We argue that higher involvement responses (e.g., confrontation) will elicit greater perceptions of dominance and benevolence in coworkers, which in turn influence the bystander’s leadership emergence. We argue that there will be a differential effect based on the bystander’s gender, such that male (versus female) bystanders will elicit much stronger reactions in coworkers. In two studies with working adults, one relying on an experiment (Study 1: N = 762) and another using a critical incident recall survey (Study 2: N = 420) provided support for our hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work as well as future research opportunities.
