Some Grapevines Have Deep Roots

If you say you don’t gossip, you’re probably lying. The word used to mean a relative or close friend, the kinds of people who tend to, well, gossip about each other. The sense of the word was later extended to mean anyone engaged in idle chitchat. Tell me you’ve never gossiped about family with a straight face. I certainly can’t! But the good news (and sometimes bad news) is that the workplace is full of people just like us. The workplace is a social environment, and, as such, most employees gossip every day.

So, the question isn’t whether people gossip, it’s why they do. In a recent article, “How Does Workplace Gossip Benefit Gossip Actors? The Impact of Workplace Gossip on Power and Voluntary Turnover,” Walton College Professor of Management Christopher Rosen examined “how gossip actors may experience social gains as a function of this information sharing.” These social gains could be expert power (i.e., when one is viewed as a source of knowledge and insight) and coercive power (i.e., when one is viewed as willing to ply their gossip to punish someone else).

Prof. Rosen and his coauthors on the study, Andrea Kim (Sungkyunkwan University), Allison Gabriel (Purdue University), Youngsang Kim (Sungkyunkwan University), and Jinhee Moon (Binghamton University), studied the gossip habits of 338 nurses and found that positive gossip increased the actor’s expert power. This in turn had a negative relationship with voluntary turnover. That is, employees who engaged in positive gossip were less likely to leave their organization.

The study highlights the importance of gossip as a source of social power, and it directs managers to one possible method of employee retention. The research indicates the cultural differences at play when employees gossip and thereby the need to have culturally diverse research participants. Past scholarship wasn’t able to fully predict the kinds of benefits employees gained from gossip – specifically coercive power – which Prof. Rosen and his coauthors attribute to the cultural differences between their Korean participants and the pool of generally Western participants in most other studies on workplace gossip.

What Employees Gossip About

 Most research into workplace gossip has focused on gossip about supervisors or peers. But that really only scratches the surface. In fact, employees talk about all sorts of people and topics related to the workplace. Drawing on earlier scholarship, the team of researchers say that gossip can be a crucial tool for employees to decide “whether management has made the right decision or taken desirable actions.”

Gossip also helps actors determine social rank and norms. For example, an employee that knows all the latest gossip might be thought of as influential in the workplace. And the higher status the topic, the more important the gossip is, which just goes to further display the gossip actor’s integral role in the organization. Similarly, negative gossip about absent third-parties could act as an implicit threat: “just see what I can do to your reputation if you cross me.”

In any case, the researchers see gossip as tied to an employee’s social power, so they suspected gossip of all kinds would work to prevent employees from voluntarily leaving their organization. That said, gossip that criticizes or otherwise undermines the workplace and its management didn’t seem to put employees in a strongly advantageous position, but gossip that shows employees as sources of knowledge did.

Gossip and Retention

 To test their hypotheses, the team of researchers collected data from nearly 400 hundred nurses on 40 teams in four different hospitals in South Korea. The researchers found that 87.4% of nurses reported that they engaged in gossip. The nurses completed questionnaires that allowed the researchers to gauge whether and to what degree the nurses engaged in both positive and negative workplace gossip. They rated themselves on questions such as “I sometimes make a negative comment on the behavior of management while they are absent” or “I sometimes praise my organization’s capability when management is absent.”

The nurses’ managers also rated the nurses on a five-point scale on their ability to influence people and the workplace both positively and negatively, essentially their perceived coercive and expert power. Their managers indicated whether a nurse “makes other nurses’ work difficult for them” or whether she “provides other nurses with needed technical knowledge” among others. The researchers then returned two years later to collect data on the voluntary turnover of the nurses who completed the survey.

Negative workplace gossip was positively associated with coercive power, but this relationship was not significant. Similarly, negative gossip also did not give the gossiper a reputation as a source of knowledge. Positive workplace gossip, on the other hand, did have a positive and significant relationship with expert power as well as a negative relationship with coercive power. Meaning managers viewed these gossipers both as beneficial sources of knowledge for other employees as well as not perceiving them as making the working day unpleasant.

While coercive power was negatively associated with turnover, the researchers did not find the effect to be significant. Expert power, however, did reduce the likelihood of the gossiper from voluntarily leaving their organization. According to these findings, the researchers say that positive gossip “can contribute to employees staying at their jobs, thus reducing turnover.”

Using Gossip for Good

 Though the researchers’ findings did not entirely accord with their expectations, the team says that the study still highlights that the sorts of social power that gossip actors can garner is culturally determined. Accordingly, they call on future researchers to reproduce their findings with other culturally diverse research participants. By studying nonwestern employee gossip, the team’s work highlights how WEIRD cohorts can skew our understanding of behavioral phenomena even when we strive for objectivity.

Most studies on workplace gossip have been conducted with workers from more individualistic societies where negative gossip may be more likely to be viewed as ‘speaking truth to power’ or advocating for oneself. The researchers say that “In the South Korean context, where criticizing others is discouraged as it upsets harmony and consolidation…it may not be the case that employees who blame the organization at work are seen to be powerful in terms of expertise.”

Some organizational psychologists have called for workplaces to eliminate as much gossiping as possible, but this isn’t really a feasible goal. Instead, their research shows there are in fact desirable outcomes associated with gossip, so they call on managers “to foster a work environment that allows gossip to occur in a productive, open manner.” After all, as Prof. Rosen and his coauthors’ work suggests, both firms and their employees can benefit from positive workplace gossip since it can both increase the gossipers’ expert power and reduce the likelihood of voluntary turnover.