Are gossipers looked down upon? A norm-based perspective on the relation between gossip and gossiper status.

Abstract

While some scholars regard workplace gossip as norm-violating behavior that costs gossipers status, others suggest that gossip clarifies organizational norms and thereby increases gossiper status. Integrating gossip literature with norm research, we develop a model to distinguish positive gossip from negative gossip and theorize their independent and joint effects on gossiper workplace status via peers' perceptions of norm violation and norm clarification-two concurrent but countervailing mechanisms. We hypothesize that positive gossip relates positively to norm clarification perceptions but negatively to norm-violation perceptions, whereas negative gossip relates positively to both norm clarification and norm-violation perceptions. Interactively, positive gossip weakens the norm-violation effects of negative gossip on gossiper status, and each type of gossip replaces the norm clarification effects of the other type of gossip on gossiper status. These hypotheses were largely supported in a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with 345 full-time employees (Study 1), a three-wave field survey with data from 192 full-time employees (Study 2), and a round-robin field survey with data from 287 focal employees and 1,075 of their team members embedded in 87 teams (Study 3). Three additional studies reported in the supplementary materials revealed contingencies of the hypotheses: The hypotheses received support with a different experimental manipulation (Study 4), and the hypothesized norm-violation effect of negative gossip was not contingent on gossip content (target's self-serving vs. nonself-serving behavior, Study 5) but gossip intention such that the effect became nonsignificant when gossip intention was group-serving (cf. self-serving, Study 6). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).