Ethics As Both A Buffer And A Resourse

After subjecting the data to the predicted model, the research team found that the highest levels of counterproductive work behaviors were indeed conducted by workers low in moral attentiveness (combining perceptual and reflective varieties) and heavily exposed to social medi...

Maintaining that gossip in the workplace can be particularly disruptive, the French research team focused on an industrial setting. The 306 employees in their sample represented 66 software houses and call centers, all located in Pakistan, who ranged from technical engineers and ...

In other words, gossip has the capacity to tear down existing social bonds, potentially creating havoc among groups of people who work together, are part of the same family, or share other connections. A tells B a story about C, and now no one in the little group feels they can t...

Gossip is hardly a phenomenon unique to the age of social media. As noted in a 2022 paper by KEDGE Business School’s Ghulam Murtaza and colleagues, “in line with its Shakespearian meaning, gossip has been massively associated with destabilizing and organizationally disruptive phenomena

The general framework of the Murtaza et al. study falls in the category of a “conservation of resources” model in the organizational literature. This model predicts that gossip leads to “emotional consumption” as employees use their energy at work to fend off hurt feeling...

Those “slings and arrows” of negative gossip, from this standpoint, become tiny insults rather than grave threats to our inner sense of well-being. Let the petty people gossip about us, in other words, it’s their problem and not ours.

To sum up, exposure to gossip...

The study’s main premise was that employees exposed to negative gossip would be more likely to engage in counterproductive work behaviors toward the company (e.g., taking extra time for themselves during breaks) and toward other workers (e.g., saying something hu...

The extent to which participants felt they were the targets of negative gossip, in turn, was hypothesized to predict emotional exhaustion or burnout, and it was this exhaustion that ultimately would lead to higher levels of counterproductive work behaviors.

The authors further hypothesized that not everyone would show this unfortunate pattern. Mitigating the pathway leading from gossip to exhaustion to counterproductive work behaviors, in the model developed by the research team, is “moral attentiveness,” a personality trait...

You might be able to relate to the concept of moral attentiveness if you consider your own everyday thoughts and actions. If given a chance to cheat, such as keeping a package sent to you by mistake, would you do it? Would it even seem like a moral issue to you? ...

As the authors concluded, “we believe that damaging conversations about someone who is not present can be a toxic virus that spreads and ultimately deteriorates an organization's environment”. The “dark side” of social media use, furthermore, was supported by the findings that

Based on the KEDGE school study, these 2 key strategies can help inoculate us against gossip's ability to bring us down:

1. Shoring up our moral attentiveness: We’ll be less likely to seek retribution, and cause further damage to our relationships, if we...