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Supervisor incivility and organizational gossip are two examples of dark organizational behaviors. Norm of reciprocity theory suggests that employees may develop revenge intentions after exposure to such behaviors while attributing blame to others. This study aims to empirically investigate the mediating effect of blaming others on the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip on revenge intention.

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to test the measurement model. Structural equation model was used to test the research hypotheses based on data gathered in Turkey from restaurant employees in Mersin Marina selected by convenience sampling. Data set that consists of 239 questionnaires was subjected to CFA.

The findings show that negative organizational gossip and supervisor incivility increase to employees’ revenge intentions, and blaming others mediates the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip no employees’ revenge intentions. In addition, blaming others mediates the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip on employees’ revenge intentions.

Empirical study has not been encountered related to dark behaviors of (especially gossip, incivility, blame and revenge intention) restaurant managers and employees as a holistic model. Therefore, this paper contributes to organizational behavior literature. Moreover, this paper suggests to restaurant managers for supply to organizational peace.

The purpose of this paper is to understand better the organizational social capital (SC) levels and their impact on organizations by focusing on personal SC and intra-organizational SC as well as their different connections to organizational gossip and employee performance.

Participants in a field study included 617 employees from five Israeli organizations in the field of aviation and shipping. Levels of personal SC, intra-organizational SC, gossip and self-evaluated performance were measured, and connections between them detected.

The results indicate that intra-organizational SC is positively connected to employee performance, while personal SC is positively linked to gossip. Personal SC also leads to performance with the mediation of intra-organizational SC, although gossip was not found to be connected to performance.

The contributions of this study are both conceptual and practical. The distinction between organizational SC levels is refined, improving organizational research accuracy and facilitating a better grasp of the connections between SC and other variables. The scant research on organizational gossip has been expanded. From a practical perspective, clarification of the link between organizational SC and performance can be beneficial to employees and organizations.

Extant scholars identified negative workplace gossip as a social stressor that negatively influences employees’ behavior and attitude. Despite the burgeoning interest in workplace stressors, limited studies have explored how the detrimental consequences of targets’ perceived negative workplace gossip spur their emotions and behaviors. Grounding on conservation of resources and ego depletion theories, this study aims to investigate why and how targets’ negative workplace gossip may contribute to trigger knowledge hiding. Specifically, the authors explore the underlying mechanism of personal ego depletion and boundary conditions of organizational justice to shed new light on the above process.

Using two time-wave survey, the authors collected 340 sample data from employees working in high-tech companies of China. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine hypothesized relationships of moderated mediation model.

The empirical results revealed that negative workplace gossip exacerbates knowledge hiding by increasing personal ego depletion. Furthermore, through testing moderated mediation model, the results showed that organizational justice (i.e. distributive and procedural justice) with the low presence moderates the stronger strength of the linkage between negative workplace gossip and personal ego depletion, and likewise, it also moderates the stronger effect of negative workplace gossip on knowledge hiding via personal ego depletion.

This study recommends several guidelines for managers and practitioners to mitigate negative gossip by strengthening organizational justice.

This study first enriches novel understanding in the literature between negative workplace gossip and knowledge hiding by using a new emotional mechanism (i.e. personal ego depletion). This research also contributes new insights by incorporating contextual boundary conditions (i.e. organizational justice) that have not been yet researched on negative gossip and knowledge hiding linkage.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that gossip is a neglected aspect of organizational communication and knowledge, and an under-used management resource.

The paper challenges mainstream managerial assumptions that gossip is trivial or tainted talk which should be discouraged in the workplace. Instead, gossip is re-framed at an organizational level of analysis, which provides the opportunity for relational knowledge about systemic failure and poor practice in healthcare to surface.

Rather than simply viewing gossip as an individual behaviour and interpersonal process, it is claimed that organizational gossip is also a valuable early warning indicator of risk and failure in healthcare systems. There is potentially significant value in re-framing gossip as an aspect of organizational communication and knowledge. If attended to (rather than neglected or silenced) gossip can provide fresh insights into professional practice, decision making and relational leadership.

This paper offers a provocative challenge to mainstream health organization and management thinking about gossip in the workplace. It offers new ways of thinking to promote patient safety, and prevent the scandals that have plagued healthcare organizations in recent years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between gossip and emotion in health‐care organizations. It draws on findings from empirical research exploring the characteristics and function of gossip which, to date, has been a relatively under‐researched organizational phenomenon.

A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing on an eclectic range of discipline‐based theories, skills, ideas and data. Methods included repertory grid technique, in‐depth interviews and structured diary records of work‐related gossip. The sample comprised 96 qualified nurses working in a range of practice areas and organizational settings in the UK.

Template analysis was used to integrate findings across three phases of data collection. The findings revealed that gossip is used to express a range of emotions including care and concern about others, anger, annoyance and anxiety, with emotional outcomes that include feeling reassured and supported. It is the individual who gossips, while the organization provides the content, emotional context, triggers and opportunities.

Nurses were chosen as an information‐rich source of data, but the findings may simply reflect the professional culture and practice of nursing. Future research should take into account a wider range of health‐care organizational roles and perspectives in order to capture the dynamics and detail of the emotions and relationships that initiate and sustain gossip.

Because gossip makes people feel better it may serve to reinforce the “stress mask of professionalism”, hiding issues of conflict, vulnerability and intense emotion. Managers need to consider what the emotions expressed through gossip might represent in terms of underlying issues relating to organizational health, communication and change.

This paper makes a valuable contribution to the under‐researched phenomenon of gossip in organizations and adds to the growing field of research into the role of emotion in health‐care organizations and emotion work in nursing.

This study aims to examine perceived organizational politics (POP) as an antecedent to workplace gossip. While the commonly held belief is that POP is consequential to the existence of negative workplace gossip, an alternate hypothesis can be that POP may predict positive workplace gossip as well. The study further explores the role of compassion as a boundary condition in the relationship of POP with negative and positive valences of workplace gossip.

Using purposive sampling technique, the data were collected through time-lagged (two-wave) surveys from employees working in private (Study 1, n = 366) and public (Study 2, n = 206) sector organizations across India, and analyzed using SPSS AMOS 27 and PROCESS Macro (Model 1).

The results of Study 1 and Study 2 revealed that POP correlated positively with negative as well as positive workplace gossip. Further, it was found that compassion moderated the relationship of POP with negative workplace gossip but failed to moderate in the case of positive workplace gossip in both the studies.

This study makes practitioners aware of the ubiquity of the phenomenon of workplace gossip and encourages them to embrace gossip in the workplace rather than banishing it altogether.

This study delineates the link between POP and the valences of workplace gossip that remains unexplored in the literature. The study also takes into account the intervening role of compassion in the aforementioned relationships. The striking results of the study open new realms of research possibilities not only in the field of workplace gossip, but POP and compassion as well.

Drawing upon affective events theory, the authors propose that the subordinates’ negative gossip acts as a targeting affective event which leads to supervisor negative emotions. In turn, such negative emotions provoke supervisors to exhibit abusive behavior toward their subordinates. Additionally, the authors propose that an affective dispositional factor, namely, supervisor emotional regulation, moderates the hypothesized relationships. Using multisource data and a moderated-mediation model, the authors find that the supervisor’s perception of the subordinates’ negative workplace gossip is associated with abusive supervision through the supervisor’s negative emotions. Moreover, the supervisor’s emotional regulation mitigates the relationship between such negative gossip and the supervisor’s negative emotions. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Data were collected from employees (e.g. subordinates) and their immediate supervisors in organizations representing a variety of industries (e.g. finance, health care, information technology, public safety and human services) located in three cities in China. Respondents were recruited from different professional online forums with the offer of free movie tickets in return for participation.

Using multisource data and a moderated-mediation model, the authors find that the supervisor’s perception of the subordinates’ negative workplace gossip is associated with abusive supervision through the supervisor’s negative emotions. Moreover, the supervisor’s emotional regulation mitigates the relationship between such negative gossip and the supervisor’s negative emotions, but not the relationship between the supervisor’s negative emotions and abusive supervision.

Like all studies, the current one is not without limitations. First, the data were collected using a cross-sectional research design, which limits the interference of causality among the hypothesized relationships in the model. Future research work should apply alternative research designs such as a daily diary or longitudinal data collection (Shadish et al., 2002), in order to support the validity of the study.

In practical terms, abusive supervision is recognized as a destructive workplace behavior that is costly to organizations (Mackey et al., 2017; Martinko et al., 2013). Thus, it is important for organizational management and practitioners to understand the reasons why supervisors exhibit abusive behavior toward subordinates.

Through this study, higher management must understand harmful effects of subordinates’ workplace negative gossip, it must be recognized as other types of workplace mistreatment (rudeness and incivility), establishment and enforcement of the code of conduct can prevent negative workplace gossip prevalence in the workplace.

This study has contributed to the organizational behavior literature in several aspects. First, most studies have examined the consequences of abusive supervisor through subordinates victimization, current study contributes in the ongoing stream of research by examining antecedents of abusive supervision through subordinates’ social victimization (e.g. negative workplace gossip) of supervisors.

Gossip is one of the reality organizations. Employees might regard gossip as a kind of information and behave based on that, thus gossip management is of great importance for effective management. In this article we investigate gossip and suggest a model for managing it.

In this paper the authors have tried to study gossip behaviors and misbehaviors and suggest solutions to manage them.

Based on the literature on gossip, the authors suggest ABC model for gossip management in organizations. In the ABC model some factors like importance, ambiguity, stress and tension, tendency to believe gossips and contrast as antecedents, making gossips, fighting gossips and spreading gossips as a strategy and other factors like mistrust, feedback, behavior modifying mechanism, information source and evaluating the employees reaction have been analyzed as the consequences of gossip.

This paper analyses intentional usage of gossips by managers to shape the intended organizational realities in light of social constructionist.

Explores the issue of rumour and gossip in organisations. Given that rumour and gossip can break the harmony of the workplace unless well managed, it is rather surprising that they have not been sufficiently examined in management and organisational studies. In addition to providing an analysis of the role played by rumour and gossip within organisations, including, but not limited to, its origin, hidden reasons and its management, the role of gender is examined. Our research reveals that despite the commonly‐held and entrenched view that women are largely responsible for instigating and perpetuating organisational rumour and gossip, a review of the evidence fails to support this claim.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test the extent to which gossip plays a role in individual reputation development in the context of contemporary organizations. This study answers the continuous calls to integrate theory across fields by exploring the theoretical links between these two constructs.

This study provides a conceptual analysis and general review of the literature on gossip and reputation. The relationship between these two constructs is investigated through a two-study package (lab and field) yielding convergent results.

The findings of this study are that gossip contributes to organizational identity in that it reinforces the social norms of groups and that gossip serves as an important enabler of reputational development. This study provides empirical evidence that gossip serves a more significant role in the development of personal reputation than more formal methods of communication.

As organizations and individuals attempt to develop and capitalize on the effects of individuals’ reputations, this study provides practical insights into the knowledge that needs to be built regarding the method by which this development can occur. This study points to the practical value of gossip in the creation of personal reputation.

The theoretical framework in this study highlights the centrality of gossip as a primary enabler of reputation development in contemporary organizations. Reputation theory is advanced by studying a segment of the construct that has, until now, been excluded from consideration in this field.