Abstract
Existing research has found that workplace negative gossip exerts a negative impact on employees and organizations. However, there is a lack of study on the spillover effect of workplace negative gossip on employees’ families. This paper aimed to address this gap in prior literature. Based on resource conservation theory, we chose married employees who perceived or suffered from workplace negative gossip as the subjects and analyzed the effect of workplace negative gossip on their work–family conflict. We adopted a self-reported questionnaire to assess employees’ perception or experience of workplace negative gossip, psychological distress, level of neuroticism, and work–family conflicts. A total of 245 valid employee questionnaires were obtained from two-wave data collection in China. The results of the empirical analysis indicated that workplace negative gossip perceived or suffered by employees has a positive impact on their work–family conflicts, and psychological distress plays a mediating role in the relationship between perceived or suffered workplace negative gossip and employees’ work–family conflict. Furthermore, we found that employees’ level of neuroticism moderates the positive effect of workplace negative gossip and work–family conflict, and it also moderates the mediating effect of workplace negative gossip on employees’ work–family conflict by psychological distress. The conclusion of this paper supported our previous hypotheses. Finally, according to the earlier findings, we discussed the theoretical contributions, practical significance, and limitations of the study and provided some practical suggestions for managers.
Highlights
Gossip is a key social behavior that nearly everyone working in any organization experiences, hears, and probably contributes to, and it exists in various organizations and places where people live (Dunbar et al, 1997; Foster, 2004; Kniffin and Wilson, 2010; Jiang et al, 2019)
Given the positive effect of Workplace negative gossip (WNG) on the psychological distress and the positive role of the psychological distress in aggravating work–family conflict (WFC), we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 2 (H2): Psychological distress mediates the positive relationship between WNG and WFC
The indicators recognized by most scholars were adopted to judge the model fit, including χ2/df, comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker–Lewis index (TLI), and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA)
Summary
Gossip is a key social behavior that nearly everyone working in any organization experiences, hears, and probably contributes to, and it exists in various organizations and places where people live (Dunbar et al, 1997; Foster, 2004; Kniffin and Wilson, 2010; Jiang et al, 2019). Some scholars pointed out that 14% of the coffee break in the workplace is gossip, and approximately 66% of the general communication between employees is talking about other topics of colleagues (Cole and Dalton, 2009). Workplace gossip is a vital channel to facilitate informal communication among employees. Workplace Negative Gossip (Kniffin and Wilson, 2005). Information passed via workplace gossip may explain matters previously unclear to the organization (Noon and Delbridge, 1993; Wu et al, 2012). Some research has found that workplace gossip is a negative behavior and an extension of abuse, which is often included in a scale that captures broader forms of bullying, such as aggression and harassment (Salin, 2001). Workplace gossip tends to have more adverse effects than positive effects on employees. According to a survey of 262 staff in America, nearly 69% of employees admitted to being verbally hurt by their leaders or colleagues in the past year (Fox and Stallworth, 2005)
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