Abstract
Gossip—defined here as unsanctioned conversations about an absent third-party—is ubiquitous in human life, universal across cultures and contexts, making up to two-thirds of all interpersonal communication. I empirically investigate the form and content of workplace gossip across contexts and explore the perceptions of gossip from a fourth-party perspective. This perspective recognizes that although gossip is a triadic construct involving a sender, receiver, and target, gossip spreads to fourth-parties within the broader organizational network. Prior and ongoing work suggests that with gossip spreads information about the gossipers themselves, leading to substantive reputational effects. This perspective takes a more global view of the effects of gossip in organizations by including downstream recipients in its analysis. Across four studies I collect evidence for the types of positive and negative, work-related and personal gossip employees engage in at disparate workplaces (Study 1), perform correlational analyses to test whether gossip characteristics such as work-relatedness and valence predict various perceptions of gossipers (Study 2), conduct vignette experiments to test the causal impact of gossip on person perception (Study 3) and a moderated mediation model of attitudinal and behavioral responses to gossip, influenced by gossiper gender (Study 4). I find that gossip is viewed unfavorably not only in terms of warmth and morality, but also in terms of assertiveness and competence. Mediation analyses suggest this results in both positive and negative gossip senders as being deemed untrustworthy and evaluators’ intentions to socially exclude them. I do not find support for gender backlash against women—i.e., my data do not suggest moderation of the effects of gossip by gossiper gender.
Committee Chair
William Bottom
Committee Members
Ashely Hardin; Calvin Lai; Hillary Anger Elfenbein; Michael Strube
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Organizational Behavior
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
5-8-2025
Language
English (en)
Recommended Citation
Vashist, Aditi, "Reputational Effects of Backchannel Communications: Gender and Fourth-Party Perceptions of Workplace Gossip" (2025). Olin Business School Theses and Dissertations. 64.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/y2jm-sx46