The co-evolution of gossip and friendship in workplace social networks

Abstract

This study investigates the co-evolution of friendship and gossip in organizations. Two contradicting perspectives are tested. The social capital perspective predicts that friendship causes gossip between employees, defined as informal evaluative talking about absent colleagues. The evolutionary perspective reverses this causality claiming that gossiping facilitates friendship. The data comprises of three observations of a complete organizational network, allowing longitudinal social network analyses. Gossip and friendship are modeled as both explanatory and outcome networks with RSiena. Results support the evolutionary perspective in that gossip between two individuals increases the likelihood of their future friendship formation. However, individuals with disproportionately high gossip activity have fewer friends in the network, suggesting that the use of gossiping to attract friends has a limit.

Introduction

Gossip and personal friendship ties are elementary building blocks of informal relations in organizations. These relations are an important quality of formal organizations, as previous research has shown that employees tend to be more cooperative and productive when their formal contacts are accompanied by informal ties (Mehra et al., 2001, Oh et al., 2004, Sparrowe et al., 2001, Sparrowe and Liden, 1997). Being the major channels through which collaborators can obtain information about the trustworthiness of their colleagues, workplace gossip and friendship complement each other in shaping an individual's reputation as a cooperative exchange partner (Burt and Knez, 1996, Burt, 2008). Friends base their positive assessment of each other's trustworthiness on their personal history of successful private exchanges with each other. An indirect way to determine somebody's reputation for being a trustworthy exchange partner is to acquire information through positive or negative workplace gossip: “informal and evaluative talk in an organization about another member of that organization who is not present” (Kurland and Pelled, 2000: 429).

There is much evidence that friendship relations and gossip ties are closely intertwined (Bosson et al., 2006, Burt, 2005, Ellwardt et al., 2012, Grosser et al., 2010, Jaeger et al., 1994, McAndrew et al., 2007, Peters et al., 2009). How exactly they influence each other is less clear. Some portray gossip as an instrument to reinforce an existing friendship relation between sender and receiver (Dunbar, 1996). Gossip about mutual enemies can reinforce existing friendship relationships (Shaw et al., 2010, Wittek and Wielers, 1998), and instill trust, and confidence (Foster, 2004, Rosnow, 2001). But excessive gossipmongers also were found to have less stable cooperative workplace relations (Wittek et al., 2000), a finding that points towards a more complex, non-linear relation between gossip and interpersonal trust. Others suggest that anyone with an “interest in the maintenance of a norm and the application of sanctions” (Coleman, 1990: 284) will spread gossip about norm violators, because gossiping essentially is costless. Gossiping therefore does neither require a strong tie between sender and recipient, nor will it increase or decrease the likelihood that such a tie will emerge. Still others emphasize the relationship building character of gossiping (Burt, 2008: 11): “Gossip is about creating and maintaining relationships (…) It is not about accurate portrayal of the people and events discussed. It is about connecting the two people sharing a story”. Through sharing stories and disclosing private information about their peers, the sender signals intimacy and closeness (Merry, 1984: 276–277). In this view, gossip can be a signaling device, a first step in the trajectory of building a strong personal tie to someone else.

In sum, gossiping is likely to affect the emergence, stability and decay of strong social ties in organizations. The major purpose of the present study is to disentangle the underlying social mechanism. This requires us to theoretically clarify the causal relation between them, and to empirically disentangle the co-evolution of both types of relationships.

Gaining insight into how gossip and friendship ties mutually affect each other contributes to the growing literature on the link between informal networks and cooperation in organizations. The strength of social ties is a major predictor of cooperative investment in social networks (Harrison et al., 2011). Strong informal relations in organizations have long been identified as important conditions that may either reinforce or hamper organizational processes as they are laid out in the formal organization chart, and as a result, there is increasing interest in the evolution of these intra-organizational networks. Gossip ties are likely to play a far more prominent role in this process than acknowledged.

In the next section, we further elaborate the theoretical background, and derive two sets of hypotheses from, respectively, social capital and evolutionary reasoning. Section three presents the research design and data of a longitudinal social network study among employees of a Dutch childcare organization. The analytical approach includes multiplex social network analyses, that is, modeling the co-evolution of gossip and friendship networks with RSiena. Section four presents the results, and section five concludes.