Summary
The workplace gossip construct is currently divergently interpreted by organizational scholars, with perceptions of its origins, functions, and impacts varying widely. In this comprehensive ...narrative review, we seek to provide much needed clarity around the often studied and frequently demonstrated employee behavior of workplace gossip by synthesizing gossip studies conducted during the past four decades in both the organization and psychology literatures. The first section of our review considers measures, designs, and theoretical frameworks featured in these studies. In the second section, we consolidate and integrate research findings from the extant literatures into three emerging categories of gossip antecedents (intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational antecedents), four categories of gossip functions (information exchange, ego enhancement, social integration, and social segregation), and three categories of gossip consequences (consequences for gossip senders/recipients, for gossip targets, and beyond the triads). In the last section, we propose an integrative model to guide future investigations on the antecedents, functions, and consequences of workplace gossip. Our review aims to provide a clear overview of existing gossip research across the organization and psychology literatures and to highlight several important trends to open up various opportunities for future impactful workplace gossip scholarship.
Certificate transparency is a promising solution to publicly auditing Internet certificates. However, there is the potential of split-world attacks, where users are directed to fake versions of the ...log where they may accept fraudulent certificates. To ensure users are seeing the same version of a log, gossip protocols have been designed where users share and verify log-generated data. This thesis proposes a methodology of evaluating such protocols using probabilistic model checking, a collection of techniques for formally verifying properties of stochastic systems. It also describes the approach to modelling and verifying the protocols and analysing several aspects, including the success rate of detecting inconsistencies in gossip messages and its efficiency in terms of bandwidth. This thesis also compares different protocol variants and suggests ways to augment the protocol to improve performances, using model checking to verify the claims. To address uncertainty and unscalability issues within the models, this thesis shows how to transform models by allowing the probability of certain events to lie within a range of values, and abstract them to make the verification process more efficient. Lastly, by parameterising the models, this thesis shows how to search possible model configurations to find the worst-case behaviour for certain formal properties.
Negative gossip is a double-edged sword, which can harm group members but also protect them from harmful others. Current theory proposes that gossip receivers assess gossipers' selfish and prosocial ...intentions based on different social cues, to determine whether the negative gossip behavior is morally justifiable. However, assessing gossipers' moral intentions does not fully clarify when and how justifiability of negative gossip is assessed by receivers. Using goal framing theory, I propose a parsimonious way of understanding when gossip receivers will be interested in determining whether sharing the negative gossip was justifiable, and how they assess justifiability. In line with predictions, results of two scenario experiments showed that in a hedonic and gain goal frame gossip justifiability was similar to a baseline level, suggesting that receivers had no particular concerns regarding gossip justifiability. However, in a normative frame receivers assessed negative gossip to be less justifiable when social cues indicated that the gossiper was motivated to harm others for self-interest compared to when such cues were absent (Study 1). In Study 2, gossip was more justified when social cues indicated that that the target broke the salient social norm and signaled that the gossiper has low motivation to harm. Moreover, in a normative frame, participants were more interested in further establishing gossip truthfulness compared to participants in a gain, hedonic, or control condition in Study 1, and in a hedonic condition in Study 2. These results show that individuals' goal frame determine their interest in gossip justifiability and how they assess it. This may help solve the paradox of negative gossip by drawing from goal framing theory to understand individuals can be avid gossip consumers, while holding widely disapproving attitudes towards this behavior.
•Receivers assess justifiability of negative gossip based on their salient goal frame.•In a hedonic and gain goal frame gossip justifiability is high.•In a normative frame negative gossip justifiability is lower than in other frames.•In a normative frame justifiability is based on social cues of gossiper motives.
Although preliminary research implies a tantalizing association between workplace gossip and interpersonal relationships, little is known about how gossip shapes relationships at work. Given that ...relationships are integral to employee wellbeing and to the development of social capital, it appears vital to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes linking gossip and workplace relationships. To this end, we induce theory from qualitative evidence regarding the processes whereby workplace gossip shapes relationships in the workplace. Taking the under-researched perspective of the gossip recipient, our study draws on multi-source data to explore how recipients’ experiences of gossip incidents affect their dyadic relationships with gossipers and gossip targets. We find that recipients’ interpretations of gossipers’ intentions—prosocial, self-serving, or genuine—initiate three distinct processes that engender a range of relational outcomes, from decreased trust to the development of close interpersonal connections. In describing these nuanced processes and their associated relational outcomes, we provide insights that extend and enrich theory and challenge conventional assumptions about workplace gossip.
Purpose
This study aims to examine perceived organizational politics (POP) as an antecedent to workplace gossip. While the commonly held belief is that POP is consequential to the existence of ...negative workplace gossip, an alternate hypothesis can be that POP may predict positive workplace gossip as well. The study further explores the role of compassion as a boundary condition in the relationship of POP with negative and positive valences of workplace gossip.
Design/methodology/approach
Using purposive sampling technique, the data were collected through time-lagged (two-wave) surveys from employees working in private (Study 1, n = 366) and public (Study 2, n = 206) sector organizations across India, and analyzed using SPSS AMOS 27 and PROCESS Macro (Model 1).
Findings
The results of Study 1 and Study 2 revealed that POP correlated positively with negative as well as positive workplace gossip. Further, it was found that compassion moderated the relationship of POP with negative workplace gossip but failed to moderate in the case of positive workplace gossip in both the studies.
Practical implications
This study makes practitioners aware of the ubiquity of the phenomenon of workplace gossip and encourages them to embrace gossip in the workplace rather than banishing it altogether.
Originality/value
This study delineates the link between POP and the valences of workplace gossip that remains unexplored in the literature. The study also takes into account the intervening role of compassion in the aforementioned relationships. The striking results of the study open new realms of research possibilities not only in the field of workplace gossip, but POP and compassion as well.
How positive and negative workplace gossip affect employees' voice behavior remains to be explored, especially in the context of collectivism. Based on social identity theory, this study investigates ...the relationships between positive and negative workplace gossip and employees' voice behavior by examining organizational identification as a mediator and collectivism as a moderator. We conducted multi-source studies by collecting three-wave supervisor–subordinate dyadic data, one with 342 workers from diverse organizations in China mainland. We found Positive workplace gossip positively affects employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior through organizational identification. On the contrary, negative workplace gossip negatively affects employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior. We further identify collectivism as an important moderator that influences the direct impact of workplace gossip on organizational identification and indirect impact of workplace gossip on employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior via organizational identification. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.
•Investigating the impact of workplace gossip on employee voice behavior.•Social identity theory explains gossip's impact on organizational identification.•Collectivism moderates workplace gossip on employee voice behavior.•Offering new perspectives on the complex dynamics of workplace gossips.
Ample experimental evidence shows that negative gossip fosters cooperation in groups by increasing individuals’ reputational concerns. However, recent field studies showed that negative gossip ...decreases organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) among its targets (i.e., people whom gossip is about). Bridging these findings, we study the role of social inclusion in explaining how negative gossip affects targets’ engagement in OCB. Based on social exchange theory, we predict that targets of negative gossip experience low social inclusion. In turn, we propose that low social inclusion leads to low OCB of gossip targets. Results of three studies, a correlational study (N = 563), a laboratory experiment (N = 85), and an online scenario experiment (N = 597), showed that being the target of negative gossip reduced social inclusion and indirectly decreased OCBs. Our multi-method approach bridges findings from research conducted in organizations and in laboratory experiments and offers a more nuanced understanding of the effects of negative gossip on targets’ behavior. We show that due to its detrimental effect on targets’ social inclusion, negative gossip may not be as effective for enabling sustainable cooperation as experimental studies claim it to be.
In this article, we focus on solving a distributed convex optimization problem in a network, where each agent has its own convex cost function and the goal is to minimize the sum of the agents' cost ...functions while obeying the network connectivity structure. In order to minimize the sum of the cost functions, we consider new distributed gradient-based methods where each node maintains two estimates, namely an estimate of the optimal decision variable and an estimate of the gradient for the average of the agents' objective functions. From the viewpoint of an agent, the information about the gradients is pushed to the neighbors, whereas the information about the decision variable is pulled from the neighbors, hence giving the name "push-pull gradient methods." The methods utilize two different graphs for the information exchange among agents and, as such, unify the algorithms with different types of distributed architecture, including decentralized (peer to peer), centralized (master-slave), and semicentralized (leader-follower) architectures. We show that the proposed algorithms and their many variants converge linearly for strongly convex and smooth objective functions over a network (possibly with unidirectional data links) in both synchronous and asynchronous random-gossip settings. In particular, under the random-gossip setting, "push-pull" is the first class of algorithms for distributed optimization over directed graphs. Moreover, we numerically evaluate our proposed algorithms in both scenarios, and show that they outperform other existing linearly convergent schemes, especially for ill-conditioned problems and networks that are not well balanced.
We consider consensus algorithms in their most general setting and provide conditions under which such algorithms are guaranteed to converge, almost surely, to a consensus. Let {A(t), B(t)} ∈ R N×N ...be (possibly) stochastic, nonstationary matrices and {x(t), m(t)} 6 R N×1 be state and perturbation vectors, respectively. For any consensus algorithm of the form x(t + 1) = A(t)x(t) + B(t)m(t), we provide conditions under which consensus is achieved almost surely, i.e., Pr-{lim t →∞ x(t) = c1} -1 for some c ∈ R. Moreover, we show that this general result subsumes recently reported results for specific consensus algorithms classes, including sum-preserving, nonsum-preserving, quantized, and noisy gossip algorithms. Also provided are the e-converging time for any such converging iterative algorithm, i.e., the earliest time at which the vector x(t) is ε close to consensus, and sufficient conditions for convergence in expectation to the average of the initial node measurements. Finally, mean square error bounds of any consensus algorithm of the form discussed above are presented.
We present and test a self-consistency theory framework for gossip: that perceived negative workplace gossip influences our self-perceptions and, in turn, this influences our behaviors. Using ...supervisor-subordinate dyadic time-lagged data (n = 403), we demonstrated that perceived negative workplace gossip adversely influenced target employees’ organization-based self-esteem, which, in turn, influenced their citizenship behavior directed at the organization and at its members. Moreover, by integrating victimization theory into our framework, we further demonstrated that negative affectivity, an individual’s dispositional tendency, not only moderated the self-consistency process but also predicted perceived negative workplace gossip. Our study therefore shifts attention to the target of negative workplace gossip and in doing so offers a promising new direction for future research. Implications to theory and practice are discussed.
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