Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Title: Not All Gossip Is Equal: How Gossip Recipients’ Reactions to Gossipers Depend on the Type of Workplace Gossip

Speaker: Rui Zhong (Penn State University)

Time: 14:00 (Tuesday), May 27th, 2025

Venue: Room 712, Mingde Business Building

Language: English

ABSTRACT:

Existing research has presented mixed perspectives and evidence on how gossip recipients react to gossipers, particularly whether their responses are negative or positive. Our work reconciles these discrepancies by proposing that the answer depends on the type of workplace gossip the recipient receives. Building on Lee and Barnes’ (2021) nuanced typology—which distinguishes between two types of negative gossip (i.e., derogation-based and protection-based) and two types of positive gossip (i.e., endorsement-based and communion-based)—we argue that the receipt of the four types of workplace gossip leads recipients to exhibit divergent emotional and behavioral responses toward the gossiper. Specifically, drawing on moral emotion theory, we hypothesize that derogation-based gossip leads to avoidant behavior through moral disgust, protection-based gossip leads to helping behavior through gratitude, endorsement-based gossip leads to endorsement emulation through moral elevation, and communion-based gossip leads to socializing behavior through companionate love. To test these hypotheses, we first developed measures following a pre-registered procedure to capture the receipt of the four types of workplace gossip with three separate samples of employees. We then conducted three pre-registered studies using complementary methods: a multi-wave survey study, a recall-based experiment, and a scenario-based experiment. The results fully supported our hypotheses.