Although researchers have examined the effects of negative workplace gossip on target employees' work-related behavior, it remains unclear when and how personality traits play a role between negative ...workplace gossip and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Drawing upon the transactional model of stress and coping, we posit a mediated moderation model of the effects of self-monitoring and impression management tactics on the relationship between negative workplace gossip and target employees' OCB. By collecting supervisor-subordinate dyadic time-lagged data, we demonstrated that the relationship between negative workplace gossip and OCB was weaker when employees were high self-monitors. In addition, we found that the moderating effects of self-monitoring were mediated by the use of impression management tactics.
This study examines how job performance (JP) is affected by nepotism and workplace gossip. It also investigates the moderating role of organizational justice between nepotism and gossip and between ...gossip and JP. 640 responses gathered from the staff at Egyptian travel agencies (Sector, A) and Egyptian 5-star hotels were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Contrary to the expectations of the study model, the results showed a positive relationship between nepotism and JP. On the other hand, the results articulated a negative relationship between gossip and JP. The results also indicated that organizational justice plays a moderating role in the relationship between nepotism and gossip and between gossip and JP. The research provides a theoretical contribution to bridging the gap in studies related to nepotism and gossip in the tourism and hotel sector. Practically, the research provides managers in the tourism and hotel sector with recommendations to combat gossip and maximize the benefits of nepotism and dispel its negatives. Limitations and potential directions for future research were presented.
Gossip is an ubiquitous phenomenon. Hearing information about others serves important social functions such as learning without direct interaction and observation. Despite important social functions ...gossip has a rather negative reputation. Therefore, the present online study focuses on the reasons why people gossip and how these reasons are related to personality (i.e., dark triad) and situational settings. Six distinct motives were identified that underlie gossip behavior: information validation, information gathering, relationship building, protection, social enjoyment, and negative influence. The most important motive was validating information about the gossip target followed by the motive to acquire new information about the gossip target. The least important motive was harming the gossip target. The motivational pattern was highly similar between private and work context. Interestingly, the importance of motives mainly depends on the gossiper's narcissism both in work and in private settings. The findings suggest that the negative reputation of gossip is not justified. In fact, even "dark" personalities appear to use gossip to tune their picture of other humans and themselves and not to harm others.
Gossip is pervasive at the workplace, yet receives scant attention in the sensemaking literature and stands on the periphery of organization studies. We seek to reveal the non-triviality of gossip in ...processes of sensemaking. In drawing on empirical data from an observational study of a British Media firm, we adopt a processual perspective in showing how people produce, understand, and enact their sense of what is occurring through gossip as an evaluative and distinct form of informal communication. Our research draws attention to the importance of gossip in the routines of daily practice and the need to differentiate general from confidential gossip. We discuss how gossip continuously informs learning as evaluative sensemaking processes that encourages critiques and evaluation to shape future action and behavior. Within this, we argue how confidential gossip can challenge power relations while remaining part of formal authority structures, constituting forms of pragmatic and micro-resistance. This shadowland resistance provides terrain for learning that both criticizes and preserves espoused values and cultural norms. We conclude that confidential gossip as an evaluative and secretive process provokes a learning paradox that both enables and constrains forms of resistance in reinforcing and simultaneously questioning power relations at work.
This study examines dynamic communication processes of political misinformation on social media focusing on three components: the temporal pattern, content mutation, and sources of misinformation. We ...traced the lifecycle of 17 popular political rumors that circulated on Twitter over 13 months during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Using text analysis based on time series, we found that while false rumors (misinformation) tend to come back multiple times after the initial publication, true rumors (facts) do not. Rumor resurgence continues, often accompanying textual changes, until the tension around the target dissolves. We observed that rumors resurface by partisan news websites that repackage the old rumor into news and, gain visibility by influential Twitter users who introduce such rumor into the Twittersphere. In this paper, we argue that media scholars should consider the mutability of diffusing information, temporal recurrence of such messages, and the mechanism by which these messages evolve over time.
•False political rumors tend to resurface multiple times after the initial publication.•False political rumors often turn into a more intense and extreme version over time.•Resurged old political rumors tend to be presented as “news”.•None-traditional partisan media are often behind the constant generation of false “news”.
In this study, we investigate the coping response of individuals who are being gossiped about. Drawing on face research and affective events theory, we propose that employees who are targets of ...negative gossip will actively respond to the gossip about them via engagement in negative gossip themselves. The findings showed that negative workplace gossip stimulated fear of losing face and led to subsequent behavioral responses, namely, engaging in negative gossip. Moreover, self-monitoring, as a moderating mechanism, mitigated the negative impacts of negative workplace gossip on the targets. We discuss theoretical implications for gossip research and note its important practical implications.
This study examines why and when negative workplace gossip promotes self-serving behaviors by the employees being targeted. Using conservation of resources (COR) theory, we find that targets tend to ...increase their political acts as a result of ego depletion triggered by negative gossip. We also show that sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment and moral disengagement moderate this process. Specifically, we demonstrate that targets with high levels of sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment are more likely to experience ego depletion, and that targets with high levels of moral disengagement will find it easier to persuade themselves to engage in political acts. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged survey of 265 employees in Guangdong, China, to test our hypotheses. The results support our theoretical model and indicate that COR theory can be used to explain the impacts of negative workplace gossip. Alongside our important and timely theoretical contributions, we provide new perspectives on how managers can avoid or mitigate these political acts.
The positive role of organizational and supervisor support for employees who are coping with being targets of negative workplace gossip has been established. However, to extend understanding of how ...external social support works in the context of workplace gossip, we investigated social support from family and friends and gender as joint moderators of the relationship between gossip and task performance of the targeted employees. A longitudinal two- wave survey research design was utilized. The sample consisted of 231 supervisor–subordinate dyads employed by five large companies in China. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted, and we uncovered a negative association between negative workplace gossip and task performance. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that external social support had an amplifying effect on the relationship between negative workplace gossip and the task performance of targeted male employees, whereas external social support had a mitigating effect for targeted female employees. This study practically guides managers to address negative workplace gossip more effectively with a consideration of gender differences, and theoretically expands understanding of the impact of social support and its interaction with gender in the context of negative workplace gossip.
As a result of the proliferation of digital and network technologies in all facets of modern society, including the healthcare systems, the widespread adoption of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) ...has become the norm. At the same time, Blockchain has been widely accepted as a potent solution for addressing security issues in any untrusted, distributed, decentralized application and has thus seen a slew of works on Blockchain-enabled EHRs. However, most such prototypes ignore the performance aspects of proposed designs. In this paper, a prototype for a Blockchain-based EHR has been presented that employs smart contracts with Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, which also provides a unified performance analysis with Hyperledger Caliper 0.4.2. The additional contribution of this paper lies in the use of a multi-hosted testbed for the performance analysis in addition to far more realistic Gossip-based traffic scenario analysis with Tcpdump tools. Moreover, the prototype is tested for performance with superior transaction ordering schemes such as Kafka and RAFT, unlike other literature that mostly uses SOLO for the purpose, which accounts for superior fault tolerance. All of these additional unique features make the performance evaluation presented herein much more realistic and hence adds hugely to the credibility of the results obtained. The proposed framework within the multi-host instances continues to behave more successfully with high throughput, low latency, and low utilization of resources for opening, querying, and transferring transactions into a healthcare Blockchain network. The results obtained in various rounds of evaluation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.
How do we understand gossip as spatialization processes? How can we address such processes through liminal space? In this article, we challenge the trap of social determinism in understanding gossip, ...and argue that gossip should be conceptualized through the mutual constitution and contestations between social relations and space. We draw on a three-month participant observation case study to explore such interactive processes and relations through the lens of liminal space. This article contributes to the existing literature on gossip by addressing the overlooked importance of ‘space’ in theorizing and understanding gossip. We emphasize that space acts as a localized context for, and an active participant in, enabling or constraining social interactions for gossip. In doing so, we explore the theoretical potential and empirical possibility of theory blending of liminal space and gossip that can shed light on future research on unmanaged and marginalized social practices in organizations.
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