Whether the conduct of a co-worker or a supervisor is sufficiently pervasive to create be actionable as a hostile work environment must be determined form the totality of the circumstances. The victim must prove that the defendant's conduct would have interfered with a reasonable employee's work performance and would have seriously affected the psychological well-being of a reasonable employee. In considering, for instance, whether a certain conduct is severe enough to constitute sexual harassment hostile work environment, the factors that will determine this will be the nature of the unwelcome sexual acts or words (generally, touching is more offensive than words), the frequency of the offensive encounters, the total number of days over which all of the offensive conduct occurred, and the context in which the harassing conduct occurred.
In determining what constitutes "sufficiently pervasive" harassment, acts of harassment cannot be occasional, isolated, sporadic, or trivial; rather, the plaintiff must show a concerted pattern of harassment of a repeated, routine, or a generalized nature.
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