经济学人｜办公室的闲话

Business Bartleby Gossip in the workplace
商业版块 巴托比专栏 职场八卦
Pssst! Want to read something about rumour and innuendo？
那谁，想读点关于流言蜚语的文章吗？

Gossip is everywhere. On one estimate, from Megan Robbins and Alexander Karan of University of California, Riverside, people spend 52 minutes a day on average talking about other people. Gossip pervades the work place. You hear it in conversations among colleagues; you know who to go to for the latest round of it. You can tell when gossip is imminent: voices suddenly lower and there may well be some theatrical looking around to check that the target is not in earshot.
八卦无处不在。根据加州大学河滨分校的梅根·罗宾斯和亚历山大·卡兰的估计，人们平均每天花52分钟谈论别人。职场中到处都是八卦。你可以在同事之间的聊天中听到八卦，你知道要听最新鲜的八卦应该去找谁。你可以判断什么时候马上就要开始说八卦：声音突然变小，可能会夸张地环顾四周，确定八卦的对象不能听见。

Sometimes it is offered up explicitly, like a vol-au-vent at a drinks party:"Do you want to hear a bit of gossip?" And yes, you almost certainly do. Managers have grapevines, too. Scholars of gossip (what happens when these people all get together at a conference is a subject for future research) tend to describe it as informal exchanges of evaluative information about people who aren't there.
有时八卦是明确主动地提供给你，就像酒会上的酥皮馅饼小点心：“你想听点八卦吗？”当然想，你几乎肯定会听。经理们也会八卦。研究八卦的学者(这些人在会议上聚在一起会发生什么，这是未来可以研究的主题)倾向于把这种八卦描述为非正式地交换关于不在场的人的评估性信息
Those exchanges can be complimentary as well as critical. By that definition, bosses who do not gossip about employees may not be doing their job properly. Its ubiquity suggests that gossip must have some benefits. It is definitely a lot more entertaining to talk about colleagues, particularly if they've been seen furtively entering a hotel room together, than the latest set of quarterly numbers.
这些交换既可以是批评性的，也可以是赞扬性的。根据这一定义，不八卦员工的老板可能没有好好完成自己的工作。八卦的普遍性表明，八卦肯定有一些好处。谈论同事绝对比谈论最新的季度数据有意思得多，特别是当有人看到同事们偷偷摸摸地一起进入酒店房间的时候。

Evolutionary psychologists also reckon that gossip is helpful in instilling social norms. In their book "The Social Brain", Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar point to the example of hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa who use gossip to convey criticism of those who fail to share the spoils of successful hunts.
进化心理学家还认为，八卦有助于培养社会规范。在《社交大脑》一书中，特蕾西·卡米莱里、萨曼莎·罗基、罗宾·邓巴引用了非洲南部狩猎采集团体的例子，这些团体通过八卦来传达对那些不分享成功狩猎战利品的人的批评。

Similar behaviour is visible in the workplace. In a recent paper by Terence Dores Cruz of the University of Amsterdam and his co-authors, participants were asked whether they would share gossip about someone who was constantly slacking off and leaving others to do the work. People were more likely to pass that piece of information on to a person who was going to have to work with this good-for-nothing than to one who was not.

The knowledge that reputations are partly forged through gossip can act as a deterrent to bad behaviour. But that reputational effect is also one reason to worry about gossip. For sometimes incentives emerge to spread inaccurate information about other people. Another experiment, conducted by Kim Peters and Miguel Fonseca of the University of Exeter, found, among other things, that lies cropped up twice as frequently when gossipers were told they were in competition with each other.


A related problem is that people are drawn to negative gossip more than positive gossip. The news that Colin did a great job generating sales leads last month is not going to spread far and wide. But if they are juicy enough, even outright falsehoods will circulate. In 2021 the Ontario Superior Court in Canada awarded hefty damages to an employee at a volunteer fire department who had been fired by the local municipality on the basis of false rumours that she had engaged in inappropriate sexual behaviour with firefighters.


If gossip can cause distress to its targets, it can also be bad for the people sharing information. One of the oddities of gossip is that everyone does it and yet it is so often frowned upon. A recent paper by Maria Kakarika of Durham University Business School and her co-authors found that being seen as a gossipmonger is unlikely to help your career.

Participants were given a scenario in which someone spread negative personal gossip about a colleague. They were not just disapproving; they also said they would be more likely to give the gossiper lower performance ratings and to recommend bonus reductions. What then should managers make of gossip? Getting rid of it entirely would require a police state, and in any case deprive the organisation of a potentially useful form of self-regulating behaviour.


However, managers can dampen demand for it. If there is uncertainty around a big event like lay-offs or the appointment of a new boss, gossip will flourish. If people think they are being treated unfairly, then they will want to vent about it to co-workers. If workers have jobs that bore them rigid, they will alleviate the tedium with chit-chat. One cure for excess gossip is decent management.

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