Are we truly wicked when gossiping at work? The role of valence, interpersonal closeness and social awareness

Abstract

 Gossip is a form of conversation that uniquely involves three actors: the gossiper, the receiver, and the target.  In professional settings, gossipers are more likely to share positive and non-malicious gossip than negative and malicious one.

The role of positive and negative gossip in promoting prosocial behavior.

“…However, despite the ample research on gossip valence (e.g., Ellwardt et al, 2012;Grosser et al, 2010;Kong, 2019;Tassiello et al, 2018;X. Wu et al, 2018;Xie et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2019), preceding research has understudied the potential influence of positive vs.…”

Silence Is Golden. Six Reasons Inhibiting the Spread of Third-Party Gossip

“…Being connected to the object through a strong personal bond therefore is another condition that may keep potential gossipmongers from sharing evaluative information about the object (Tassiello et al, 2018). Not hurting those with whom we have a solidarity relationship is a strong social norm.…”

Dealing With Negative Workplace Gossip: From the Perspective of Face

“…Therefore, this result, on one hand, verifies the view of previous scholars that self-monitoring, as a personality trait, could be used to effectively deal with workplace gossip (e.g., Xie et al, 2019 ); on the other, it also provides us with insights, that is, it may be able to restrain the targets from engaging in negative gossip. Existing studies on the boundary mechanisms of gossip have generally focused on the following aspects: situational characteristics, e.g., organizational change, uncertainty, and ambiguity (Mills, 2010 ); job social support (Tian et al, 2019 ); work-unit cohesiveness (Loughry and Tosi, 2008 ); civility climates (Li et al, 2019 ), gossip characteristics, e.g., gossip veracity (Dores Cruz et al, 2019a ); statue of target (Ellwardt et al, 2012 ); relationships in gossip triad; content of gossip (Tassiello et al, 2018 ; Giardini and Wittek, 2019 ), cognitions, e.g., traditionality (Wu X. et al, 2018 ); just world beliefs (Zhou et al, 2020 ); reputational concerns (Martinescu et al, 2019a , b ); creative self-efficacy (Zhou et al, 2019 ); trustworthiness (Lee and Barnes, 2020 ); perceived insider status (Kim et al, 2019 ), and emotions, e.g., negative affectivity (Wu L. Z. et al, 2018 ), all of which have made outstanding contributions to the boundary mechanisms of gossip. However, at the same time, we notice that the research on personality traits is still insufficient.…”

“…Second, we contribute to the workplace gossip literature by integrating it with face research for the first time. Although scholars studying gossip often explicitly or implicitly mention its impact on external images (Wu et al, 2016 ; Tassiello et al, 2018 ), empirical research is still scarce. In this regard, we introduce a specific concept related to face, fear of losing face, and theorize and empirically test the connection between the two concepts.…”