Although it has an unfavorable connotation, gossip is not always negative. However, I have found that when I stick to positive or neutral gossip, my mood and relationships improve. The data showed that almost all study participants gossiped (only 34 of the 467 people didn't gossip at all). Most gossip was not coded as positive or negative; most gossip recorded in this study (75 percent) was neutral.
Women engaged in more neutral gossip than men, but the amount of negative and positive gossip shared between men and women was fairly constant. And in general, people who were more extroverted tended to gossip more than those who were more introverted. University of Groningen, Business School of the Netherlands, University of Exeter (United Kingdom) In this study, we investigated the response of the people they gossip about. Based on facial research and the theory of affective events, we propose that employees who are the subject of negative gossip actively respond to gossip about them by participating in negative gossip themselves.
The findings showed that negative gossip in the workplace stimulated fear of losing one's reputation and generated subsequent behavioral responses, namely, participating in negative gossip. In addition, self-control, as a moderation mechanism, mitigated the negative impacts of negative workplace gossip on objectives. We discuss the theoretical implications for gossip research and look at their important practical implications. In short, by combining facial research with AET (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1999), we propose a new theoretical framework for understanding the emotional impacts of negative gossip in the workplace on goals and their subsequent behavioral responses.
Specifically, we identify the fear of losing one's reputation as a mediating mechanism in the relationship between negative workplace gossip and participation in negative gossip. We suggest that negative gossip may arouse fear of losing face on goals (Zhang et al. According to the AET, personality traits can influence the emotional response process (Weiss and Cropanzano, 199). In addition, some studies have shown that people respond differently to threats, because personality characteristics play an important role in this process (Ho, 197).
Self-control as a trait can play this role, that is, it can affect the way in which targets react to gossip about them. Self-control is defined as the extent to which people desire and are able to control their public expression and shape their public appearances under the guidance of social adequacy (Snyder, 1977). Therefore, given the importance of self-control in making sense of and dealing with information related to humiliation or shame and the external image (Turnley and Bolino, 200 years old), we identify it as a construction that refers to the extent to which people are willing and able to control. their public expression and the form of their public images (Snyder, 1977).
We predict that self-control moderates the relationship between negative workplace gossip and fear of losing one's reputation. Therefore, based on the AET, which points out that personality traits influence the process of work events that affect emotional responses and subsequent behaviors (Weiss and Cropanzano, 199), we propose that people with a high level of self-vigilance are less likely to consider negative gossip as a worrying fact that endangers their faces, because they are always attentive to the negative information that surrounds them and they have the trust necessary to face it. Therefore, a high level of self-control reduces the detrimental impact of negative workplace gossip on the target, alleviating the fear of losing one's reputation. However, when the recipients of negative gossip have a low level of self-control, negative gossip is more likely to further aggravate their bad reputation, since they lack adequate preparedness and repression skills (Turnley and Bolino, 200), increasing the fear of losing one's reputation.
As a result, Figure 1 shows our theoretical framework. Participants were recruited by a large entertainment company located in Beijing, China. At the first stage of data collection, we first assure participants of confidentiality and voluntary participation, and then distributed the questionnaires to a total of 600 company participants. Among them, 498 participants (82.67%) returned the questionnaires.
We surveyed all participants once again one more time one month later (hour), and 420 valid questionnaires were answered from the 498 participants, representing a response rate of 84.33%. Finally, another month later (1 hour), we surveyed the participants who responded in the second moment, obtaining the final sample of 326 participants (77.6%). We measured participants' self-control with an 18-item scale developed by Snyder and Gangestad (198). The items were evaluated on a five-point response scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
The examples were: “I suppose I set up a program to impress or entertain others”. In different situations and with different people, I often act like very different people (α %3D 0.8). Table 1 presents descriptive statistics and correlations for all the key variables. Before the confirmatory factor analysis, we first performed a Harman single-factor test taking into account that all the variables in this study, that is,.
The result showed that only one factor emerged with only 29.1% of the variance, indicating that the problem of common method bias can be avoided in the current study. Then, we conduct a series of CFAs to further ensure the satisfactory discriminatory validity of negative workplace gossip, fear of losing reputation, self-control, and participation in negative gossip. The results suggested that the hypothetical four-factor model (%2 %3D 535.44, df %3D 224, CFI %3D 0.93, TLI %3D 0.92, RMSEA %3D 0.0) yielded a better fit than any other alternative model (see table). Based on facial research and AET, this study developed theoretical arguments and empirically tested the relationships between being the subject of negative gossip and participating in negative objective behavior with respect to gossip, and further explored the role of the face as a mediating mechanism in this process, namely, the fear of losing one's reputation.
This study also examined a contingent effect, namely, self-control, which mitigated the positive relationship between negative workplace gossip and fear of losing one's reputation. Next, we analyze how our findings contribute to existing literature and management practices. This study has two important practical implications. First, it shows that the recipients of the negative gossip engaged in negative gossip out of fear of losing their reputation.
The findings remind managers that they should pay special attention to employees' personal problems. The personal face is related to the competence and reputation of someone in a position, which is related to the personal status of an employee in a group and future professional development; therefore, employees usually attach great importance to it. It is a common but easy to overlook phenomenon in organizational management. In fact, we rarely see provisions expressed in official documents or in the daily regulations of organizations.
However, the results of this study show that employees who were concerned about losing their reputation responded to aggressors seeking revenge, which eventually had a negative impact on individuals and organizations. Therefore, we believe that managers should pay more attention to the facial needs of employees. For example, employees who have performed well in their position should be publicly and ceremonially commended. In addition, we also suggest that organizations establish formal feedback channels or effective communication mechanisms, rather than relying solely on employees' own gossip networks, in order to help employees communicate with each other about work-related information and provide emotional counseling.
Second, our findings indicate that self-control could be a personality trait that responds effectively to negative gossip and that it could also inhibit someone's subsequent behavior when gossiping. This conclusion especially reminds us that we should pay more attention to people with poor self-control in the workplace, as they may be more likely to suffer the negative effects of negative gossip in the workplace. In this regard, we suggest that managers provide employees with a variety of training programs on interpersonal communication, conflicts and psychological construction and, at the same time, allow them to make their own decisions, in order to improve their ability to deal with potential gossip about them and other complex interpersonal relationships. Second, we collect three-wave data, which do not allow causal inference.
Despite this, the research model is theoretically and empirically validated. Longitudinal studies and field experiments are still needed, since they are more effective in terms of causation. In this study, we predicted that being the subject of gossip would generate more gossip in itself. However, we cannot rule out that it was gossip about the targets that made them the target of gossip later on.
Based on this, we encourage future studies to reexamine these relationships in a longitudinal or experimental way to further clarify the causality between them. Workplace gossip is a common phenomenon in organizations. Based on facial research and AET, this research explored the mediating role of the fear of losing face between negative gossip in the workplace and participation in negative gossip about objectives and also included self-control as a regulatory factor. Considering that the information contained in gossip is closely related to stakeholders, we call for more research into workplace gossip and its impact on objectives.
The authors declare that the investigation was carried out in the absence of commercial or financial relationships that could be interpreted as a possible conflict of interest. Specifically, demographic information, participation in negative gossip, and negative workplace gossip were measured at time 1.However, gossip can quickly worsen and negatively affect someone else's life, so try to avoid it as much as possible. In this sense, the face may be more directly associated with workplace gossip, since workplace gossip primarily involves the evaluation of work-related aspects, while reputation is more multi-source and is mainly characterized by personal qualities. Second, gossip can be used as an information-gathering tool to make sense of real and real situations in order to gain an insight into group norms.
Gossip is rewarded, so people will continue to gossip as long as they don't hear anything negative about themselves. A bad gossip, on the other hand, is someone who shares information about others to get ahead or gain an advantage, or simply recklessly. And his team has discovered that gossip is also one of the forces that promote cooperation between groups. The findings showed that negative gossip in the workplace, as an affective event, could increase the fear of losing one's reputation and, therefore, cause participation in negative gossip about objectives.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that gossip can play an important role in maintaining social order, Willer says. . .
Leave Reply