Abstract
Whereas organizational research has historically focused on the negative effects of workplace gossip behaviors, in this paper, we draw on social information processing theory to examine both the benefits and costs of perceived work-related gossip prevalence. On the one hand, we suggest that perceived work-related gossip prevalence is beneficial to employees’ job performance. Employees who perceive work-related gossip prevalence to be high should experience higher levels of performance pressure. Performance pressure, in turn, should be positively associated with higher job performance. At the same time, however, these same employees will also experience lower levels of psychological well-being due to the lack of emotional ties and trusting relationships that they have with co-workers. We furthermore suggest that both the positive and negative effects of perceived work-related gossip prevalence are moderated by the valence of the gossip prevalence, such that employees feel more performance pressure (and, in turn, higher job performance) and experience worse psychological well-being when the valence of their perceived gossip prevalence is negative.
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Notes
Recent research (e.g., Marsh, Lüdtke, Nagengast, Morin, & Von Davier, 2013) has discussed the potential problems of item parceling and cautioned against its use. In this study, however, we deem it appropriate to adopt the parceling technique for three reasons. First, the key prerequisite of using parceling is that “relations among constructs are accurately represented if cross-loadings or correlated uniquenesses are eliminated by parceling” (Marsh et al., 2013, p. 261). This prerequisite concerning the use of parcels versus individual items in structural equation modeling is less relevant in our research, because we adopted a path-analytic approach to hypothesis testing and used item parcels only for confirmatory factor analyses. Second, Marsh et al. (2013, p. 261) stated that “the use of item parcels is only justified when there is good support for the unidimensionality of all the constructs at the item level.” Indeed, all focal variables in this study have been widely conceptualized and measured as unidimensional constructs. Third, statisticians have advocated the use of parceling in case of an item-to-subject ratio lower than 1:10 (Kunce, Cook, & Miller, 1975; Marascuilor & Levin, 1983), as in our research (1:9.5 for study 2 and 1:5.2 for study 3).
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This research was supported by the grants funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71572066 and 71832004).
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Tan, N., Yam, K.C., Zhang, P. et al. Are You Gossiping About Me? The Costs and Benefits of High Workplace Gossip Prevalence. J Bus Psychol 36, 417–434 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-020-09683-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-020-09683-7