When is Workplace Chat 'Just Gossip' and When is It 'Sharing Information'? It Depends Who's Doing It
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The Conversation New Zealand and Australia
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When two junior employees bump into each other in the corridor and start chatting about their manager’s overbearing manner, it’s typically considered gossip. But what about when two managers have an off-record catch-up to discuss an under-performing employee? Both scenarios meet traditional definitions of gossip – the information being shared is about other people, the people it’s about are absent, the information is shared in a way that casts judgement on those people, and it’s informal. Yet the two situations are viewed very differently. What counts as gossip is much more slippery than we might think. I reviewed 184 academic articles to understand what really constitutes workplace gossip. The key, I found, is not any set of objective criteria, but rather people’s shared agreement that a situation counts as gossip. This understanding of gossip helps us make sense of the “workplace gossip paradox” – the idea that gossip can be considered both a reliable source of social information (“the inside word”) and an unreliable information source (“just gossip”). My work also provides insights into how businesses can manage gossip before it becomes a scandal.
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The Conversation. February 17, 2025. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/when-is-workplace-chat-just-gossip-and-when-is-it-sharing-information-it-depends-whos-doing-it-251242
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