Revisiting Gossip v. Rumor

This blog draws a distinction between rumor and gossip. While each can contain elements of the other, gossip is defined here as the sharing of potentially harmful, strictly personal news between two or more individuals about a third. A rumor is the transmission of information, such as a guess that a company may be sold or that a new CEO is coming on board. The study of rumor typically focuses on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the information that is being transmitted. Gossip, on the other hand, is only incidentally interested in the truthfulness of what is being talked about. Gossip is about being exciting, juicy, scandalous, spicy, salacious and sensational regardless of truth.

While both involve the informal sharing of information, primarily based on personal relationships, I see a significant difference between the two both in content and tone. What we are interested in is the destructive content and tone of gossip not the accuracies and inaccuracies of the informal spread of information through the grapevine of an organization. On the other hand, gossip and rumor collide when gossip is spread by way of the grapevine. In this case, gossip becomes the subject matter of rumor. It is the vibrancy of the grapevine that explains how gossip can quickly be transmitted throughout an organization.

A Management Perspective

This blog is specifically concerned with the destructive effects of gossip on organizational culture and performance. The primary goal of my writing is to provide a thorough understanding of gossip and a path by which to overcome its destructiveness. Informal communication is an essential part of organizational behavior and, in my view; it does not have to have a malicious, corrosive side. Gossip is all too often a beast running free in the workplace inflicting great harm. It must be tamed and controlled to minimize the damage.

Managers must use as much sophistication when dealing with gossip as they would any other aspect of business life; taking employee communication seriously. Thinking about gossip requires work, because when you analyze it you must also think about concerns like the atmosphere of a workplace, whether interactions between employees tend more to the positive than to the negative and about whether positive communication is even encouraged at your workplace. It also makes managers think about a workplace’s corporate culture or style, something often admittedly uncomfortable. But ignore it at your own peril. If the style of your workplace is oppressive, or the overall tone or policies of the workplace is repressive, you’re guaranteed that toxic gossip will flourish.

Read Aloud

Most gossipers in an organization will initially deny it and will be offended if accused. They probably even believe their own denials. Even when directly confronted with a vicious or poisonous e-mail, the person may insist that they were just being blunt or honest.

So, what can you do? Here is one suggestion: to break through the denial have the person read the nasty or gossipy message aloud. This can also be an excellent tactic to ensure that your own emails are not loaded up with a nastiness that you are not intending. When read aloud, you may very well get a response like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe it. No wonder that person got out of shape.’ Ultimately we all need to become better monitors of our own communication.

Say-it-in-Person Test

A cornerstone of this blog is the belief that an organization can build a communication culture that supports positive interaction while discouraging negative, personally destructive acts. So what is the enlightened office to do to encourage healthy, supportive and productive communication, be it a church or a Fortune 500 company? First off, thinking back over the immediate prior blog, if you can say something in person, don’t use email. Talking to someone personally has the impact of creating greater accountability for what a person is saying. If you can’t simply walk down the hallway to speak with someone, pick up the phone. E-mail has its place as a communication tool but it should be treated like a letter going out, versus something flippant. We should all remember that an e-mail is less personal than face to face interaction and does create a permanent record. The communicator should know that they will be evaluated on the basis of that permanent record. The defense that it is an e-mail not a formal memo should not be persuasive.

Gossiping with Thousands

Recently I was talking with a professional colleague who specializes in the study of communication. He believes that there are those among us who hide their gossip behind a façade of honesty; “I am just being honest.” But, from his perspective, people who pride themselves on bluntness or what they term “honesty” in dealing with others seldom like to get a taste of their own medicine. “They don’t want anyone to communicate back to them that way. They want to send out a rocket or missile, without taking any flak themselves.”

We were further contemplating how e-mail has changed the impact of gossip. The following is a summary of his basic argument:

What I have noticed is that people who communicate face-to-face verbally have less issues of ever being misunderstood. With the advent of email and instant messaging, what should be routine communication easily turns into full-blown misunderstanding. At least when people used to gossip, they were talking to someone - it was one on one. Now it’s one on 1,000. With an email, I can pass my gossip on to 100 people, then stick it in my blog and it’s on to 1,000 more people. Gossip used to be somewhat restrained. Now it’s viral, and you can’t track it down anymore. Nowadays days, where can you go to get your good name back?”

Tilting at Gossip

Recently it was suggested to me that discussing the topic of gossip had a Don Quixote element. From this perspective, working to control gossip is futile given the propensity of the human race to talk about each other.

I would find this argument persuasive if my purpose was to eliminate or control every day chit-chat. But, I am not concerned about normal, benign interaction. My focus is on the destructive impact of communication when it turns ugly and I am not convinced that it is a futile effort to work on controlling or eliminating this type of communication from the workplace. I would further emphasize that my primary focus is not directly on eliminating malicious interaction but rather on building a civil workplace that is strong enough to choke out the dark side of gossip.

Magnifying the Problem

During the past year there has been an ongoing saga with regard to a small town in the New England states. It seems that a number of employees engaged in acts of gossiping about the city manager’s relationship with a female employee – the gossip all started when she received a nice promotion. Four long-term employees were discharged for having participated in the gossip. Lawsuits have been filed, at least one employee was returned to work and the drama continues.

So, should employees have their employment terminated when they engage in acts of gossip? Under a union contract that would be extremely difficult unless the problem was severe and the employee had been repeatedly warned that gossiping behavior was inappropriate and could lead to termination. Without a Union contract, there are still two primary problems. The first is the extent to which employees have been put on notice as to the fact that gossiping is considered a serious breach of conduct and can lead to discipline. The second is the problem of proof; what is the evidence that the employee has engaged in gossip? I will have much more to write about the relationship between discipline and gossip in a later blog.

Ultimately, one has to wonder whether the decision of the City manager to terminate the four employees works contrary to his interests. For one thing, it seems like an overreaction to what is a rather common phenomenon . Also, it can creates increased suspicion that the gossip was in fact true. Most important, regardless of whether the gossip was true or false, reacting formally to the presence of gossip gives it a front page presence and insurers that everyone is well informed about the subject matter.

Basically I do not believe that in most cases gossip can be attacked head on. Instead of reducing the problem it will most often magnify it. Rather, I believe that the only truly effective approach is to promote, primarily through modeling, the kind of behavior that leads to a positive, civilized workplace.

Rumor v. Gossip

I have often called gossip the dark side of informal communication. The term informal communication is usually associated with an organization where communication has both formal and informal dimensions. Informal communication has a lot to do with the social networks within an organization and the word grapevine used as a synonym. Informal communication can be very important to the success of an organization because it is almost always faster than formal communication. Additionally informal communication has the advantage of candor but also the potential problem of inaccuracy.

Rumor is another form of informal communication. Rumor can be defined as spreading and collecting information through the grapevine. Gossip, as I am defining it in this blog, can be spread by way of rumor. However, while it is easy and often common place to use the words rumor and gossip interchangeably, they can be distinctly separate activities. Gossip is defined as malicious communication about a person or persons. Rumors do not have to be personal in nature as they often involve organizational activities, technical information, changes in organizational strategy and other matters of importance to individuals within the organization.

Examples

One of my reasons for publishing this blog is to provide a venue for sharing examples of destructive gossip and tactics that have been tried to address the problem.

Please, share your thougts and experiences.

Say it to Their Face

One of the difficulties in discussing gossip is the fact that the term encompasses a wide variety of behavior. My interest in the topic is narrowly focused on gossip as malicious, destructive communication behavior. I recognize that we are all social creatures and that spending time with others discussing the details of people’s lives is both normal and important. So, how does one distinguish between the gossip that I want to expunge from the workplace and that which is both necessary and healthy? Here is one test; in talking with a fellow employee about a third employee would you change what you were saying if the third employee joined the conversation? If what you are saying about a person cannot be said when that person is present then maybe you should not be saying it at all.