How Workplace Gossip Shapes Interpersonal Relationships: A Qualitative Study from the Gossip Recipient’s Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although preliminary research implies a tantalizing association between workplace gossip and interpersonal relationships, little is known about how gossip shapes relationships at work. Given that relationships are integral to employee wellbeing and to the development of social capital, it appears vital to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes linking gossip and workplace relationships. To this end, we induce theory from qualitative evidence regarding the processes whereby workplace gossip shapes relationships in the workplace. Taking the under-researched perspective of the gossip recipient, our study draws on multi-source data to explore how recipients’ experiences of gossip incidents affect their dyadic relationships with gossipers and gossip targets. We find that recipients’ interpretations of gossipers’ intentions—prosocial, self-serving, or genuine—initiate three distinct processes that engender a range of relational outcomes, from decreased trust to the development of close interpersonal connections. In describing these nuanced processes and their associated relational outcomes, we provide insights that extend and enrich theory and challenge conventional assumptions about workplace gossip.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".