Despite the ubiquity of gossip in the workplace, the management literature offers a limited understanding of its consequences for gossip senders. To understand whether gossiping is beneficial or ...detrimental for the gossip sender, it is necessary to consider the perspective of gossip recipients and their response to gossip. We develop a typology of gossip that characterizes archetypal patterns of interpreting gossip. We then draw from attribution theory to develop a multilevel process model of workplace gossip that focuses on how the gossip recipient's attributions of a gossip episode shape the gossip recipient's subsequent response and behaviors. In addition to the valence and work-relatedness dimensions of gossip that comprise the typology, we examine credibility and the status of the gossip target as fundamental features of the gossip episode that jointly affect the gossip recipient's attributions. At the episodic level, the process of deciphering the gossip sender's motives influences the subsequent reciprocation of gossip. Depending on the locus of causality attributed to the gossip episode, gossip also contributes to the perceived trustworthiness of the gossip sender and the gossip recipient's cooperation with or social undermining of the gossip sender over time. The proposed model suggests that the potential benefits or social consequences of gossip for the gossip sender depend on the characteristics of the gossip and the context of the gossip episode that serve as inputs to the gossip recipient's attributional process.
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.
Justice-type Schadenfreude is a pleasant emotion that is evoked subsequent to the feeling that the misfortune of others was justified. This study examined whether justice-type Schadenfreude is ...related to gossiping about unjust people by means of a scenario-based experiment. The results of the analysis of data from 162 Japanese undergraduate students enrolled suggested that justice-type Schadenfreude was not associated with the intention to share information about unjust people.
Every story has two sides, so does gossip. Unlike prior studies that condemn gossip, our research analyzes whether managers’ gossip benefits subordinates. Gossip is informal conversation about other ...people who are absent at the scene, and gossip may be positive or negative. Positive gossip contains positiveness and appreciation, whereas negative gossip encloses negativeness and depreciation. We propose that managers’ positive gossip acts as commitment facilitator, implying a sense of recognition to subordinates. We also propose that subordinates appreciate such recognition by showing commitment toward managers. Research data are gathered from anonymous questionnaires that are distributed to 117 managers and 201 subordinates from five industries in Taiwan. Bootstrapping and structural equation modeling techniques are used to analyze the data. Managers’ positive gossip is found to be correlated with subordinates’ commitment toward managers, which also mediates subordinates’ perception of well-being, team empowerment, and job embeddedness. Yet, manager’s negative gossip is not correlated with any research variables. Our research is the first of its kind to explain why managers’ gossip has potential to be a commitment facilitator, and has brought news insights into gossip literature. Implications of the research findings also help reduce the bias associated with workplace gossip.
•Managers shall appreciate workplace gossip, as it matters in the workplace.•Managers’ positive gossip is related with subordinates’ commitment towards managers.•Managers’ positive gossip merits subordinates.
To be placed above the Reach of Deceit is to be placed above the Rank of a human Being - Henry Fielding, A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, 1753. Throughout his literary and legal ...careers, Fielding was concerned with the difficulties of reading and judging character accurately. He saw society as being rife with deceptive and duplicitous individuals and articulated his concerns in his writing, offering various advices to his readers. This thesis examines Fielding’s changing approaches to characterization and his proposed methods for judging character. There is a strong tradition within Fielding criticism, particularly prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, of seeing Fielding’s characters as ‘essential’, that is to say, innate and unchanging: the product of his theory of ‘Conservation of Character’. As such, his characters are often deemed easy-to-read and lacking fully-determined internal lives. Since the mid-1990s, however, critics have begun to argue that his characters are more dynamic than first supposed. While critics have noted the role of judgement in Fielding’s novels, it has not yet been explored in depth in his plays. With some notable exceptions, few studies have explored the interrelation between his novels and plays in a sustained way. I argue that Fielding examines questions of discerning character in both his plays and his novels, and that the early plays are essential for understanding the concepts which are central to his theory of judgement. This thesis contributes to studies of Fielding in three ways: by intervening in long-standing discussions of Fielding’s characterization; by analysing themes of good nature, perception and gossip which develop from his early dramatic work into the better-known novels; and by exploring its relationship to wider ideas about character in the eighteenth-century theatre and novel. Beginning with his plays, I consider Fielding’s presentation of the judgement of character in a range of his works from 1728-1753. I suggest that the early plays gave Fielding the space in which to experiment with the presentation of character and his relationship to his audience. His novels build upon concepts first introduced in the plays, such as good nature, perception and gossip, which he suggests are key to perceiving character. Fielding encourages his audiences and readers to engage with character as a process of discovery (as it is in life), but does not punish or mock them when they make mistakes. In doing so, he gives his audiences and readers indulgences he could ill afford in his magisterial career: time for judgement and the luxury of occasionally being proved wrong.
Spreading rumors on the Internet has become increasingly pervasive due to the proliferation of online social media. This paper investigates how rumors are amplified by a group of users who share ...similar interests or views, dubbed as an echo chamber. To this end, we identify and analyze 'rumor' echo chambers, each of which is a group of users who have participated in propagating common rumors. By collecting and analyzing 125 recent rumors from six popular fact-checking sites, and their associated 289,202 tweets/retweets generated by 176,362 users, we find that the rumors that are spread by rumor echo chamber members tend to be more viral and quickly propagated than those that are not spread by echo chamber members. We propose the notion of an echo chamber network that represents relations among rumor echo chambers. By identifying the hub rumor echo chambers (in terms of connectivity to other rumor echo chambers) in the echo chamber network, we show that the top 10% of hub rumor echo chambers contribute to propagation of 24% rumors by eliciting more than 36% of retweets, implying that core rumor echo chambers significantly contribute to rumor spreads.
Gossip is condemned but also ubiquitous and thought to be essential for groups. This triggers the question of which motives explain gossip behavior. Hitherto, negative influence, social enjoyment, ...group protection, and information gathering and validation are established as motives to gossip. However, venting emotions-discussed as a potentially important motive-has been overlooked empirically. Furthermore, a lack of consensus about a definition of gossip may have affected previous conclusions about gossip motives. This study (
= 460) expands the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire (MGQ; Beersma and Van Kleef, 2012) by including a subscale measuring emotion venting, the desire to share emotionally evocative experiences. To validate the five motives to gossip across definitions, we asked participants to report the most recent gossip event they experienced, randomly assigning them to one of three instructions containing different gossip definitions commonly used in the literature: (1) broad instructions (sharing information about third parties who have no knowledge of the exchanged information), (2) narrower instructions (adding that the shared information must be evaluative), and (3) instructions using the word gossip. After participants recalled and described a gossip event, they completed the 25-item measure of five motives to gossip: social enjoyment, information gathering and validation, negative influence, group protection, and emotion venting. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the five-factor structure. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis supported full invariance across the three definition conditions. This indicates the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire successfully measures the five dimensions argued to motivate gossip and can be applied in research conceptualizing gossip both narrowly and broadly.
PurposeAlthough many probable consequences of workplace gossip have been featured prominently in the organizational behavior literature, existing research lags in identifying the possible causes ...behind it. In the present research, the authors aim to examine self-focused personality traits such as narcissism and core self-evaluation (CSE) as predictors of negative (NWG) and positive workplace gossip (PWG). In addition, the study tests the moderating influence of perceived organizational politics (POP) on the aforementioned relationships.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a time lagged field study on a sample of 616 employees from various organizations across India. The proposed theoretical model was tested using structural equation modeling procedures in AMOS.FindingsNarcissism was found to relate significantly with NWG as well as PWG. CSE, on the other hand, showed significant association with NWG only. Further, POP was found to moderate the relationship between narcissism and PWG.Practical implicationsPresent study makes practitioners aware of the ubiquity of the phenomenon of gossip and encourages them to design and implement policies that cater to the needs of communication of employees. It also advises managers to carefully examine political scenario in the organization, and understand how it can be moulded for the betterment of employees as well as the organization.Originality/valueFirst, using social comparison theory, the authors introduce personality traits as predictors of NWG and PWG. Second, by exploring POP as the boundary condition, the authors take into account the most common yet unexplored factor that affects gossip behavior in the organizations.
Although negative gossip is ubiquitous in the workplace, we know little about how negatively gossiping about the supervisor—who occupies a higher hierarchical position in the organization—influences ...gossipers themselves. To address this question, we draw on the conservation of resources theory to account for the resource‐consuming and resource‐generating impact of negative gossip about the supervisor on gossipers’ work engagement. Findings from three experience sampling studies show that negative gossip about the supervisor is a double‐edged sword for gossipers that seems to do more harm than good to their work engagement. On the one hand, spreading negative gossip about the supervisor evokes the resource‐consuming mechanism of image maintenance concerns, which impairs gossipers’ work engagement, especially when perceived organizational politics is higher. On the other hand, engaging in such gossip elicits the resource‐generating mechanism of sense of power, which only improves work engagement in Study 3 but not in Studies 1 and 2; contrary to our expectation, this effect is unaffected by perceived organizational politics. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical contributions of our research.
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