Are You Gossiping About Me? The Costs and Benefits of High Workplace Gossip Prevalence

Abstract

Whereas organizational research has historically focused on the negative effects of workplace gossip behaviors, in this paper, we draw on social information processing theory to examine both the benefits and costs of perceived work-related gossip prevalence. On the one hand, we suggest that perceived work-related gossip prevalence is beneficial to employees’ job performance. Employees who perceive work-related gossip prevalence to be high should experience higher levels of performance pressure. Performance pressure, in turn, should be positively associated with higher job performance. At the same time, however, these same employees will also experience lower levels of psychological well-being due to the lack of emotional ties and trusting relationships that they have with co-workers. We furthermore suggest that both the positive and negative effects of perceived work-related gossip prevalence are moderated by the valence of the gossip prevalence, such that employees feel more performance pressure (and, in turn, higher job performance) and experience worse psychological well-being when the valence of their perceived gossip prevalence is negative.