Capturing Workplace Gossip as Dynamic Conversational Events: First Insights From Care Team Meetings

Abstract

Even though gossip is a ubiquitous organizational behavior that fulfils important social functions (e.g., social bonding or emotion venting), little is known about how workplace gossip and its functions unfold in situ. To explore the dynamic nature and social embeddedness of workplace gossip, we develop a behavioral annotation system that captures the manifold characteristics of verbal gossip behavior, including its valence and underlying functions. We apply this system to eight elderly care team meetings audio- and videotaped in the field, yielding a sample of N = 4,804 annotated behaviors. On this empirical basis, we provide first insights into the different facets and functions of workplace gossip in real-life team interactions. By means of lag sequential analysis, we quantify gossip patterns that point to the temporal and structural embeddedness of different types of workplace gossip expressions. Though exploratory, these findings help establish workplace gossip as a dynamic conversational event. We discuss future interdisciplinary research collaborations that behavioral observation approaches offer.