When Targets Strike Back: How Negative Workplace Gossip Triggers Political Acts by Employees
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ORIGINAL PAPER
When Targets Strike Back: How Negative Workplace Gossip Triggers Political Acts by Employees Bao Cheng1 · Yun Dong2 · Zhenduo Zhang3 · Ahmed Shaalan4,5 · Gongxing Guo6 · Yan Peng7 Received: 24 December 2019 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This study examines why and when negative workplace gossip promotes self-serving behaviors by the employees being targeted. Using conservation of resources (COR) theory, we find that targets tend to increase their political acts as a result of ego depletion triggered by negative gossip. We also show that sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment and moral disengagement moderate this process. Specifically, we demonstrate that targets with high levels of sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment are more likely to experience ego depletion, and that targets with high levels of moral disengagement will find it easier to persuade themselves to engage in political acts. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged survey of 265 employees in Guangdong, China, to test our hypotheses. The results support our theoretical model and indicate that COR theory can be used to explain the impacts of negative workplace gossip. Alongside our important and timely theoretical contributions, we provide new perspectives on how managers can avoid or mitigate these political acts. Keywords Negative workplace gossip · Political acts · Moral disengagement
Introduction Gossip is a common social phenomenon: most people engage in it or are targeted by it at different times in their everyday lives. Research has shown that more than half of the time that people spend talking is devoted to gossip (Dunbar 2004). At work, employees find that gossip is an important informal communication tool, and often participate in it to gather and exchange information (Beersma and Van Kleef * Yun Dong [email protected] 1
School of Business Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China
2
School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR 999077, China
3
School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
4
Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK
5
Faculty of Commerce, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt
6
Business School, Shantou University, Shantou, China
7
School of Management, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
2011; Kniffin and Wilson 2010; Kuo et al. 2015; Mills 2010) and to satisfy their social needs (Brady et al. 2017). Given its prevalence, researchers have paid much attention to its influence in organizations. They have found that workplace gossip can benefit organizations, groups and gossips to a certain extent (Beersma and Van Kleef 2011; Feinberg et al. 2012; Michelson and Mouly 2002), but targeted employees may suffer significant harm, especially from negative gossip (Kuo et al. 2015; Wu et al. 2018b), since people have greater sensitivity to negative events than to positive ones (Baumeister et al. 2001), a
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