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Gossip is everywhere. On one estimate, from Megan Robbins and Alexander Karan of University of California, Riverside, people spend 52 minutes a day on average talking about other people. Gossip pervades the workplace. You hear it in conversations among colleagues; you know who to go to for the latest round of it. You can tell when gossip is imminent: voices suddenly lower and there may well be some theatrical looking around to check that the target is not in earshot. Sometimes it is offered up explicitly, like a vol-au-vent at a drinks party: “Do you want to hear a bit of gossip?” And yes, you almost certainly do.
Managers have grapevines, too. Scholars of gossip (what happens when these people all get together at a conference is a subject for future research) tend to describe it as informal exchanges of evaluative information about people who aren’t there. Those exchanges can be complimentary as well as critical. By that definition, bosses who do not gossip about employees may not be doing their job properly.
Its ubiquity suggests that gossip must have some benefits. It is definitely a lot more entertaining to talk about colleagues, particularly if they are seen furtively entering a hotel room together, than the latest set of quarterly numbers. Evolutionary psychologists also reckon that gossip is helpful in instilling social norms. In their book “The Social Brain”, Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar point to the example of hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa who use gossip to convey criticism of those who fail to share the spoils of successful hunts.
Similar behaviour is visible in the workplace. In a recent paper by Terence Dores Cruz of the University of Amsterdam and his co-authors, participants were asked whether they would share gossip about someone who was constantly slacking off and leaving others to do the work. People were more likely to pass that piece of information on to a person who was going to have to work with this good-for-nothing than to one who was not. The knowledge that reputations are partly forged through gossip can act as a deterrent to bad behaviour.
But that reputational effect is also one reason to worry about gossip. For sometimes incentives emerge to spread inaccurate information about other people. Another experiment, conducted by Kim Peters and Miguel Fonseca of the University of Exeter, found, among other things, that lies cropped up twice as frequently when gossipers were told they were in competition with each other.
A related problem is that people are drawn to negative gossip more than positive gossip. The news that Colin did a great job generating sales leads last month is not going to spread far and wide. But if they are juicy enough, even outright falsehoods will circulate. In 2021 the Ontario Superior Court in Canada awarded hefty damages to an employee at a volunteer fire department who had been fired by the local municipality on the basis of false rumours that she had engaged in inappropriate sexual behaviour with firefighters.
If gossip can cause distress to its targets, it can also be bad for the people sharing information. One of the oddities of gossip is that everyone does it and yet it is so often frowned upon. A recent paper by Maria Kakarika of Durham University Business School and her co-authors found that being seen as a gossipmonger is unlikely to help your career. Participants were given a scenario in which someone spread negative personal gossip about a colleague. They were not just disapproving; they also said they would be more likely to give the gossiper lower performance ratings and to recommend bonus reductions. If you are the Wuhan wet market of office gossip, the place where rumour reliably replicates, you may end up being treated with similar suspicion.
What then should managers make of gossip? Getting rid of it entirely would require a police state, and in any case deprive the organisation of a potentially useful form of self-regulating behaviour. However, managers can dampen demand for it.
If there is uncertainty around a big event like lay-offs or the appointment of a new boss, gossip will flourish. If people think they are being treated unfairly, then they will want to vent about it to co-workers. If workers have jobs that bore them rigid, they will alleviate the tedium with chit-chat. One cure for excess gossip is decent management. ■
Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:
The lessons of woke Scrabble (Apr 18th)
Productivity gurus through time: a match-up (Apr 11th)
The six rules of fire drills (Apr 4th)
Also: How the Bartleby column got its name