Prattling Politics: Examining the Effect of Perceived Organizational Politics on Workplace Gossip

Abstract

Often, gossip literature focuses on identifying meaning of gossip, its nature and the associated outcomes. However, there lies a gap in conceptual development of antecedents that give rise to gossip in the workplace. In this paper, the authors examine the most common yet unexplored antecedent to workplace gossip i.e., perceived organisational politics (POP) by drawing arguments from Affective Events Theory. While the commonly held belief is that perception of politics is consequential to the existence of negative workplace gossip (NWG), an alternate hypothesis can be that POP may enkindle positive workplace gossip (PWG) as well. The authors, further, examine how the course of POP to gossip meanders with compassion. The model was tested using time-lagged data from two samples- Sample 1: Private sector organisations, n= 366, and Sample 2: Public sector organisations, n= 206. The results revealed that POP correlates positively with NWG as well as PWG. Additionally, it was found that compassion moderated the relationship of POP with NWG, but failed to moderate in case of PWG. The present paper contributes to the emerging field of inquiry on workplace gossip by empirically establishing POP as a precursor to gossip at work and compassion as a moderator of this relationship.