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From Victim to Perpetrator: Exploring the Progressive Impact of Perceived Negative Workplace Gossip on Target Employee Behaviour

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Thesis embargoed until 1st October 2027(3.42 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Bui, Anh Minh

Supervisor

Kim, Peter B.
Zhu, Dan

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Master of International Hospitality Management

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Gossiping is a chronic issue in modern society with the assistance of various online and offline communication platforms. Indeed, workplace gossip has been considered as an inevitable part of any organisation. From the practitioners’ perspective, it seems as a non-threatening phenomenon considering how ubiquitous and deeply rooted it is in the society. However, there are several linkages found between gossiping at work and severe consequences, especially its serious impact on the target employee’s both personal and professional life. This master thesis is conducted as an attempt to investigate this phenomenon in the hospitality and tourism setting, also to understand how the experience of being the target of negative workplace gossip may turn victims into perpetrators, and to explore the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of this process. The topic of negative workplace gossip has been studied in the literature but it has rarely been investigated in the hospitality context, in particular, the responses of the target employee to negative gossip is largely neglected. Recently, researchers have started to realize the significant connections between hospitality workplace’s attributions and negative gossip. The core practice of hospitality business requires frontline employees to maintain an open communication streamline with guests, inter-department co-workers along with cross-department colleagues throughout the day. Unsurprisingly, this element accidentally creates a breeding ground for negative workplace gossip to occur, which brings various challenges to the hospitality and tourism workplace. Indeed, most research focuses on the “flight” responses (i.e. damaging service performance, inhibiting employee’s organisational citizenship behaviour and in-role behaviours) while the “fight” responses are yet to be examined. As such, based on the social network theory, the current study integrates counterproductive work behaviours as the consequence of perceived negative workplace gossip. The study also explicates this relationship by studying moral disengagement as the mediator based on cognitive dissonance theory. Furthermore, workplace friendship is incorporated as the moderator based on social identity theory and social learning theory. Friendship is widely recognised as a favourable factor in the workplace, but its dark side remains overlooked. Hence, this research fills the literature gap by answering the largely forgotten question of whether workplace friendship manifests undesirable behaviours. This study employs a positivist research design using quantitative methodology. The study adopts a survey method to collect the data for the research. There are a total of 194 paired data collected from 194 hospitality and tourism employees in Vietnam at two points in time, with a two-week interval. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 29 and Mplus 8.3 were used for data analyses and hypotheses testing. In particular, the research conducted a CFA test for measurement model, zero correlation, regression, and moderated mediation analysis to analyse the collected data. The research reveals that perceived negative workplace gossip positively related to target employees’ counterproductive work behaviour. The findings also show that moral disengagement mediates this relation. Furthermore, workplace friendship is found to be the moderator of the relationship between perceived negative workplace gossip and counterproductive work behaviour through moral disengagement. Specifically, the indirect effect is stronger when workplace friendship level is higher and weaker at lower level workplace friendship. This is the first research to explore the relationship between perceived negative workplace gossip and counterproductive work behaviour along with its underlying mechanism and boundary condition. The contributions of the current study to the existing literature and their theoretical and practical implications are unveiled together with advice for future research on hospitality and tourism organisational behaviour.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18082

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Masters Theses