Just Gossip; Nothing Consequential, or is It?

Abstract

Workplace gossip is ubiquitous and leader humor is highly valued. Based on cognitive evaluation theory we reason that perceived negative workplace gossip and leader humor provide informal yet important social cues to jointly affect employees’ job insecurity and subjective career success. We test such reasoning empirically with three-wave surveys of 335 employees from a large Chinese information technology company. Our results show that gossip and leader humor, which may appear to be inconsequential to some, do matter in the workplace in terms of job insecurity and career success.