Turning Workplace Gossip into a Springboard for Productive Behaviour

Abstract

Gossip has been one of the employees’ most frequent informal activities, especially in the last few decades. However, both seasoned and early-career administrators sometimes miss out on the benefits that come along with its practice, resulting in an over-emphasis on its dangers. This study examined the reasons for the concept of the gossip phenomenon, its functions and effects, and how to get the best out of it in an enterprise space among public sector employees in Ghana. The study, which was based on secondary data, identified four main functions of gossip in an organisation: information-sharing, entertainment, friendship, and penetration. We found that, in terms of negative gossip, the individual and the organisation have a responsibility to discourage the gossip act. It was further revealed that sharing individual and team victories encourages positive gossip, which in interns reinforces a strong bond among team members and improves employees’ morale in the workplace. We conclude that, as long as man remains a social being and gossip is a social activity, then everyone has a propensity to gossip. Therefore, gossip is inevitable, but what makes gossip thrive is not simply the social nature of man; rather, it is the social support that gossip receives from the group or network with which it is shared. Thus, going forward, we recommend, among other things, that refusing to respond to gossip and effectively repudiating it with support is the surest way to stop gossip in its tracks.