Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: The gossip that goes home: Why negative workplace gossip is everyone’s problem

By J. N. Halm

It is one of those workplace phenomena that everybody knows about, but nobody wants to talk about — at least not officially. Gossip. It is as old as human society itself.

In our offices, on our factory floors, in our hospital corridors and bank branches, gossip flows freely. People whisper about colleagues, speculate about promotions, share unflattering stories about supervisors, and trade rumours about those who are not in the room.

I am well aware that this is the norm in most organisations across this country. But I am also aware that this is more prevalent in some companies than in others. In some companies, gossiping is like a pastime, or even an Olympic sport. Employees dedicate man-hours and resources to it. People will go out of their way to find out, or even dig up, the dirt on someone.

Unfortunately, in many organisations, gossip is treated as a harmless if unfortunate fact of working life. Management frowns on it publicly and ignores it privately. Employees indulge in it and then move on.

But what if gossip is not harmless? What if the effects of being the subject of negative workplace gossip extend well beyond the office—beyond the working hours, beyond the commute home, and into the private lives of the people being talked about?

A study published in the August 2023 edition of The Service Industries Journal forces us to reckon with exactly that question. The title of this particular study was “The Work–Family Spillover and Crossover Effects of Negative Workplace Gossip.” The researchers examined 230 frontline employees and their spouses from a service company in China, tracking what happened when an employee was the target of negative workplace gossip. The findings paint a picture that should be sobering for any organisation that has been casual about gossip in its ranks.

The researchers used two key concepts in this study. The first is the Ego Depletion Theory, which holds that self-control and emotional regulation draw on a limited pool of mental and emotional energy. When that energy is depleted—by stress, conflict, or in this case, being the subject of negative gossip—the individual has fewer resources left to manage other demands on their attention and emotions. The second is Crossover Theory, which describes how the emotional states and experiences of one person can spill over and affect those who are close to them.

Putting these two frameworks together, the researchers traced a clear pathway. An employee who is targeted by negative gossip at work experiences what the researchers call a “resource drain”. The effort required to navigate the social minefield of being talked about—the anxiety, the defensiveness, the mental energy spent trying to figure out what is being said and by whom—gradually depletes the employee’s inner reserves. With those reserves running low, the employee struggles to manage the boundary between their professional and personal lives. Work-family conflict increases.

And then, because people who are emotionally depleted tend to act out their frustration in the spaces where they feel safest, the spouse becomes an unwitting recipient of the emotional overflow. The employee undermines the family—a term the researchers use to describe behaviour that is difficult, disruptive, or hurtful toward family members.

In other words, the gossip that started in the office follows the employee home.

This is a finding with very significant implications for organisations in Ghana. Ours is a society in which the family unit remains the central pillar of social life. The well-being of the family is not merely a private matter—it is a cultural imperative. Yet, many of our organisations give little thought to how the conditions of work might be affecting the family lives of their employees. The connection between what happens in the office and what happens in the home is not one that typically features in management conversations in this country.

And yet, the evidence is clear. Workplace gossip—something that many managers dismiss as trivial or unavoidable—can travel home with the employee, drain the emotional resources of a marriage, and cause damage to family relationships that may take years to repair. The person sitting across the dining table from your employee, who has absolutely nothing to do with your organisation, is nonetheless being affected by the culture you have allowed to flourish within it.

It is also worth reflecting on who is most likely to be targeted by negative workplace gossip. Research consistently shows that it is often the most visible employees—those who are perceived as high performers, those who have received special recognition, those who are considered favourites of management—who become targets of gossip. In a country like Ghana, where hierarchical dynamics and the politics of “who knows who” play a significant role in organisational life, gossip can also be weaponised against people from certain backgrounds or used as a tool in factional office politics. The targets are not random. And the damage done to them is not contained within office hours.

The researchers found one very important protective factor, however, and this is where organisations can find both hope and a clear course of action. Perceived organisational support—the degree to which an employee feels that the organisation genuinely cares about their wellbeing and values their contribution—was found to buffer the negative effects of gossip in both the work and family domains.

Employees who felt supported by their organisations were better able to withstand the resource drain of being gossiped about. Their reserves replenished faster, their work-family conflict was less severe, and the crossover effect on their spouses was diminished.

This is a powerful finding because it shifts the conversation away from simply trying to stop gossip—a notoriously difficult task—and toward something organisations can more directly control: the quality of support they provide to their employees.

What does perceived organisational support look like in practice? It means managers who actually listen when employees bring concerns to them. It means HR policies that are fair, transparent, and consistently applied. It means creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up about interpersonal problems without fear of being dismissed or penalised. It means recognising employees’ contributions in visible and meaningful ways, so that the rumour mill has less power to diminish them.

Many organisations in Ghana invest significantly in external customer experience initiatives—mystery shopping programmes, customer satisfaction surveys, service training workshops. All of that is important. But the same organisations often underinvest in the internal cultural conditions that shape how employees actually feel about coming to work every day. Yet, as this research shows, those internal conditions have consequences that reach far beyond the organisation’s walls.

There is a broader lesson here too, one that goes beyond the specifics of gossip. The idea that what happens in the workplace stays in the workplace is a fiction. Employees do not arrive at work as empty vessels. They bring their full selves—their histories, their insecurities, their relationships, their families. And they take their full selves home again at the end of the day, carrying whatever the organisation has added to their load.

Organisations that understand this do not just manage performance. They manage the whole person. They ask not just how an employee is performing but how the employee is doing. They recognise that a team member who is being quietly tormented by workplace gossip is not just a productivity risk — they are a human being whose marriage may be under strain, whose children may be growing up with a parent who is chronically depleted and emotionally unavailable.

That is a serious matter. And it deserves to be treated as one.

The gossip that goes home is everyone’s problem. It is time our organisations started owning that responsibility.

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