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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between toxic workplace environments, negative workplace gossip and knowledge hiding, by exploring workplace spirituality as a moderating variable in this relationship.

This study focusses on private university lecturer in West Java, Indonesia. Data collection was carried out by distributing questionnaires to respondents offline and online via Google Forms. Data analysis was done by structural equation modeling (SEM).

The findings reveal that a toxic workplace environment and negative workplace gossip are positively related to knowledge hiding. In addition, it was found that workplace spirituality moderates the relationship between a toxic workplace environment and negative workplace gossip with knowledge hiding.

This study extends the research model and research context of knowledge hiding in private universities. This research contributes to the social exchange theory literature by proving empirical support to confirm that there is a social exchange in interpersonal relations between academics.

This study extends the research model and research context of knowledge hiding in private universities, linking it to the conservation of resources theory. This research contributes to the social exchange theory literature by proving empirical support to confirm that there is a social exchange in interpersonal relations between lecturers.

Leaders need to instill spirituality in lecturer so that they feel comfortable when working, and it indirectly reduces the effects of negative behavior such as negative gossip and a toxic environment that makes them willing to share knowledge.

To the authors’ understanding, this is the first study to examine workplace spirituality as a variable moderating the relationship between toxic workplace environment and negative workplace gossip with knowledge hiding in the college context.

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.

In this paper, the impact of customer incivility on work engagement was investigated. The authors also explored whether supervisor positive gossip and workplace friendship prevalence moderated the impact of customer incivility on work engagement in the Nigerian context.

The authors used a time-lagged design to collect data from 258 frontline casual dining restaurant employees across city centers in South-eastern Nigeria who completed Time 1 and Time 2 paper surveys after a one-month interval.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that while customer incivility was negatively lx`inked to work engagement, supervisor positive gossip and workplace friendship prevalence were positively linked to work engagement. It was also found that both supervisor positive gossip and workplace friendship prevalence moderated the negative connection between customer incivility and work engagement.

One proactive way to forestall the negative impact of customer incivility on work engagement is for managers to devise approaches to decrease the impact of uncivil customer behaviors, such as developing an atmosphere that engenders friendship and speaking positively to subordinates about other employees' work behaviors.

Although increased scholarly attention has been paid to workplace incivility, customer incivility has not been sufficiently addressed. Earlier research on workplace gossip is influenced by the widely-held belief that gossip is often negative, with far less attention given to the sunny side of gossip. This study is one of the earliest efforts to examine the moderating roles of supervisor positive gossip and workplace friendship prevalence in the negative link between customer incivility and work engagement in the hospitality industry.

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.

This paper investigates the focal role of close co-worker friendship in reducing incivility. Furthermore, this paper examines negative workplace gossip as a mediator and gender and promotion focus as moderators.

Using a time-lagged approach, 553 full-service restaurant front-line co-workers in Greater Cairo responded. Further, the data were analyzed using SmartPLS v.4.

Promotion focus weakened close co-workers’ friendships, causing them to speak negatively about each other with other co-workers. Multi-group analysis showed that males were more likely to spread negative gossip about their close co-workers and thus were subjected to incivility-related behaviors by their co-workers.

This paper is an early attempt to explore the focal role of promotion focus in the full-service restaurant context. This paper adds to affective events theory (AET) with a limited understanding of explaining and predicting co-worker incivility.

本文擬探討同僚間緊密的友好關係在減少不文明行為方面所扮演的重要角色。此外、本文擬把職場的流言蜚語看作是調解員而對其加以探索; 本文亦把性別和對晉升的關注看作是仲裁人而進行探究。

研究人員使用時間差距法進行研究和探討。數據來自553名於大開羅提供整套服務的餐館內工作的一線員工所給予的回應。研究人員以SmartPLS 結構方程建模軟體第四版 (SmartPLS v.4) 對數據進行分析。

研究人員發現，僱員對晉升的關注削弱了同僚間緊密的友好關係，並驅使他們在其他同事中對同僚作負面的評價。另外，多組分析顯示了男性員工更有可能散播關於其要好同僚的閒言閒語，因此，他們會遭受同僚不文明的待遇。

本研究是早期的嘗試，去探索在提供整套服務餐館的背景下，僱員對晉升的關注所扮演的重要角色。另外，本研究的結果將會添加至情感事件理論 - 該理論就解釋和預測同僚不文明行為所提供的闡釋似有點不足。

People are more likely to participate in work-related events that might cause positive and negative affective reactions. Prior research linked coworker friendship with incivility; however, few studies investigated negative workplace gossip. Simultaneously, linking coworker friendship with incivility through positive/negative affective responses is lacking. As such, this paper aims to examine this relationship via the dual mediation effect of positive and negative workplace gossip.

A total of 398 subordinates at family restaurants in Greater Cairo were surveyed, and data was analyzed using SmartPLS4.

Coworker friendship significantly influences coworker incivility via positive and negative workplace gossip and other underlying mechanisms.

Managers should take the initiative to decrease gossip by sharing information promptly and thoroughly and establishing effective channels for information exchange. In the case of an informal plan, restaurant managers may seek to create a welcoming and motivating corporate atmosphere and cultivate social ties among subordinates to prevent the creation of negative gossip. Restaurant managers should give victims of negative gossip timely psychological counseling.

This paper contributes to the restaurant literature on affective emotional responses to coworkers’ judgment-driven behavior from new perspectives.

Underpinned by affective events theory (AET), this paper examines the effect of coworker friendship on coworker incivility in family-style restaurants. Furthermore, this paper seeks the mediation effect of positive workplace gossip.

Using a time-lagged approach, 83 headwaiters and 326 servers at family-style restaurants located in Port Said and Ismailia responded, and their responses were analyzed using AMOS v. 24.

Multigroup analysis findings proved that coworker friendship increased positive workplace gossip in favor of the server sample. At the same time, the latter decreased coworker incivility in favor of the headwaiter sample. Besides, positive workplace gossip partially mediated the coworker friendship–incivility association in favor of the server sample. Furthermore, incivility levels increase between married coworkers and their peers in favor of the server sample.

From the AET lens, this paper offers valuable insights into affective and emotional reactions to closest coworkers' judgmental behavior in the restaurant industry.

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.

Despite the recent extending research on knowledge hiding, there is still scant research on social stressor phenomena-related contextual antecedent factors and new cognitive mechanisms of knowledge hiding behaviors. To shed new light on this unexplored gap, this research explores the multi-level moderated mediation model that examines how and when negative gossip experienced by targets in the workplace induces their knowledge hiding from coworkers drawing from the lens of social learning and cognitive theories. More specifically, this study aims to evaluate the relationship between negative workplace gossip and knowledge hiding via moral disengagement, and this mediation effect is also moderated by team relational conflict as a novel boundary condition.

This study collected multi-wave 338 employees’ data from 68 teams of cross-sectional industries in China, which were nested within teams. The collected nested nature data were analyzed by employing multi-level analysis based on hierarchical linear modeling.

The results suggested that negative workplace gossip first triggers moral disengagement and thereby, leads to knowledge hiding. Furthermore, the direct positive association between negative workplace gossip and moral disengagement was strengthened by increasing intra-team relational conflict. In addition, the mediation effect of moral disengagement between negative workplace gossip and knowledge hiding was also strengthened through increasing intra-team relational conflict.

This study first empirically examines the multi-level model using a new underlying mechanism (moral disengagement) and team-level boundary condition (relational conflict) and enriches the current literature on knowledge management and workplace gossip. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings and future research lines are also discussed, which will facilitate practitioners and academicians to curb counterproductive knowledge behavior.

This study aims to explore how and when negative workplace gossip damages hospitality employees’ career growth, based on social information processing (SIP) and social cognitive career theories.

The authors gathered data from 379 individuals working in Guangzhou’s hospitality industry with a multi-wave survey.

This research found that negative workplace gossip harms career growth by damaging one’s personal reputation, and concern for reputation plays a moderating role. In particular, employees displaying greater concern for reputation are more inclined to perceive a diminished personal reputation when exposed to negative workplace gossip, resulting in more negative assessments of their career growth prospects in their organization.

This study has some practical implications. It highlights the need to mitigate negative workplace gossip by fostering a harmonious work environment, implementing reputation-focused training programs and providing support to employees who are particularly concerned about their personal reputations.

This research contributes to the knowledge by empirically revealing the career consequences of negative workplace gossip, incorporating personal reputation and concern for reputation in the theoretical model and advancing research in the vocational and gossip domains. It also enriches SIP and social cognitive career theories while focusing on the hospitality industry.