13.12.07

Changing Standards

It seems sometimes almost quaint to tag gossip and gossiping as a bad thing. We live in the age of gossip. The proliferation of gossip about celebrities, from sports figures to movie stars to politicians, has increased by a startling degree in the past few decades, and I believe that has loosened the restraint on people’s tongues in many areas of life. The state of Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ marriage and her death, the drunk driving arrest of Mel Gibson, the page problem of former Florida U.S. Congressman Mark Foley, etc., etc.) – all have sparked obsessive media coverage.

Before the 1970s, almost none of this gossip would have been known by the public at large, let alone have graced the pages of a mainstream newspaper or magazine. The National Enquirer, among others, has changed the standards of journalism. Today, not only are we hit with gossip everywhere from the supermarket check-out line to the nightly news, we can almost count on it when we open our email.

Just how quickly have things changed about our attitudes toward gossip? If you go back not too very long ago, to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, one thing stands out – his personal life was not a primary subject for the media. For example, a number of his biographers have written extensively about his relationship with the “tall, blonde secretary,” a relationship which seemingly continued sporadically in one fashion or another over several decades. But although the affair was hardly unknown around Washington and reported on occasionally in the media, it certainly never became the pulsating, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news phenomenon seen in the case of President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. That relationship, though it had little to do with the genuine issues of the day, quickly dominated media airtime and pages and spawned endless political analysis.

Prominent presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner in history, put it eloquently in a keynote lecture at Kansas State University in 1997:

"Just imagine what the modern media would have made of the Roosevelt White House. The secretary in love with her boss, a woman reporter in love with Eleanor…Prime Minister (Winston Churchill) drinking much of the day. And yet, fortunately, because there was an unwritten rule that the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they had a direct impact on their leadership, these unconventional relationships were allowed to flourish. How I wish we could return to that standard today, for I have no doubt that many of our best people are unwilling to enter public life for fear of the unnecessary intrusion into their private lives."

Does gossip hurt? How many of us, seeing how the private lives of political figures are subject to the most intense scrutiny and the most insidious interpretations, are willing to run for public office?

6.12.07

Ignore Gossip?

My primary interest in the study of gossip is focused on its impact on organizational effectiveness. More specifically, my primary research and writing interests are on what it takes to make work a great place to be (www.makingworkagreatplacetobe.com). The important question, then, relates to the impact of gossip on creating a workplace that attracts employees.

It is easy to consider gossip unworthy of serious attention. Or, one can see most gossip as benign and of having little impact on the affect of the workplace. After all, if it was that important, they would have given a course on it in business school, right? But, how does gossip, particularly its dark side, contribute to making a great workplace? It can't, and ignoring gossip allows it to take on a life of its own, consuming and inflaming office communications. If unchecked, it can and will overwhelm all other forms of interaction, and waste considerable employee time. I have seen it turn an atmosphere toxic almost overnight.

We know unchecked gossip decreases job satisfaction. No one ever puts on a job application that they seek to work in a poisonous atmosphere, obviously. A constant barrage of gossip makes people lose sight of their primary mission. It clearly can decrease productivity, impair morale and markedly effect relations between employees. It can lead excellent employees to seek new jobs, wasting their experience and the valuable training time invested in them. It is not out-of-the-question for it to lead to lawsuits. It fosters distrust and insecurity. It damages careers.

5.12.07

Male Gossip (continued)

In the blog posted yesterday, I began to look at the topic of male gossip. I argued that men are guilty of engaging in destructive gossip but frequently it involves subjects that we do not traditionally link to gossip; subject like business and religion. Of course, men are not immune to the pleasures of a juicy tidbit. It’s just that men frequently label it with by different words, giving it the aura of greater legitimacy.

Witness the sports page. Certainly, part of that section is devoted to a recitation of yesterday’s game, but a great deal of it is made up of endless speculation about who is in, who may be pitching, replacing the star, who will sign with what team, who might be injured, who is using steroids. Studies have shown that men are very interested in gossip that involves status; who is “in,” and who is “out,” who has authority, whether formal or informal. While celebrity driven-magazines aimed at women have exploded in recent years, so have specialized sporting magazines aimed at men that revel in insider information and “scoops.”

Two other related areas of great interest to men, one traditional and one cutting-edge, also traffic heavily in gossip: Politics and blogging, with its frequently accompanying medium, podcasting. And as any veteran of the Armed Services can attest to, the male-dominated military inspires endless speculation – i.e. gossip – about most everything.

And obviously, the financial industry on Wall Street thrives on gossip and rumor, from hints of lower-than-expected-earnings at a given company to what the Fed is planning to do with interest rates. In the business world, men like to call gossip by the oh-so-respectable sobriquet “networking.”

4.12.07

Male Gossip

One of the misperceptions about gossip is that it is subject dependent. By that I mean that gossiping always involves a certain type of subject such as sex, infidelity, divorce and other salacious matters. There is, however, a growing body of feminist literature that would challenge this perspective.

Basically the argument is that for thousands of years what women typically talk about is seen as subjects for gossiping while what men usually talk about is not viewed as involving gossip (this is also divided by the connotation of good communication versus bad communication and you can guess where the connotations lie). Women discuss the details of the lives of family and friends. Men talk about politics, religion and business. Traditionally, chatting about family and friends is viewed as gossip. Talking about government or business is obviously not gossip but rather serious “male” interaction.

But, can not much of what is called male interaction also be classified as gossip? For example, a great deal has been written about conspiracy theorists. Are not most conspiracy interactions that occur over the Internet no more than gossip? Are not the main purveyors of this gossip male? And, does not this gossip have a substantially harmful effect on our society? I point you the reader to a recent article I read called, “Highway to Hell” http://www.newsweek.com/id/73372. Think about male gossip when you read this article.

3.12.07

Jewish Teaching on Gossip

I have previously taken a quick peek at how Christians and Muslims view gossiping. The Jewish religion sets forth a similar prohibition against the act of gossiping. The word gossip in Hebrew is lashon hara. Its literal translation is the “evil tongue.” Jewish teaching holds that gossip is wrong even if it is true and spread with out malice. The Chefetz Chaim lists a whopping 31 commandments that may be violated when a person passes on or listens to gossip, including "You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people" (Leviticus 19:15-16). To live the faith takes the courage to say when confronted with gossip: “I can’t and I won’t listen to this.”

To passively listen to gossip is as bad a transgression in Jewish teachings as being the one who spreads the gossip. Rabbi Dr. Aher Meir, of the JCT Center for Business Ethics, says in an article for the Jewish Ethicist (online) that Jewish sages hold that gossip kills three: the teller, the listener and the subject. It doesn’t have to be a false or slanderous story; as long as the subject of the report would prefer not to have information known, it is gossip and not fit for further dissemination.

Meir concedes it can be difficult to avoid gossip in an office; doing so can damage someone’s position professional and socially – even leading to the extent he or she might actually be ostracized. But that is the price that must be paid, he says, quoting Rabbi Yisrael Meir HaCohen, the Chefetz Chaim, in a “classic work” on the topic: “Even if refraining from slander will cause a person to lose his job, he has no choice but to fulfill the Torah’s mandate.” It’s also possible, Meir said, that setting a good example can cause other workers “to draw inspiration and courage from your example and also limit their tale bearing.”