Gossip Hurts More in the Tower of Babel: Linguistic Ostracism Facilitates the Influence of Self-Perceived Negative Workplace Gossip on Gossip Targets’ Organisation-Based Self-Esteem

Drawing on Social Identity Theory, Ethnolinguistic Identity Theory, and Hostile Attribution Bias, this study focuses on self-perceived negative workplace gossip, i.e., workplace gossip targets’ perceptions of being a subject of negative gossips, and explicates how it is attributed by them to induce a sense of workplace exclusion and affect targets’ organisation-based self-esteem (OBSE). I pay particular attention to the moderating role of linguistic ostracism, a type of workplace ostracism in which the communicator(s) switch to another language that others cannot understand during communications, facilitating other participants’ feelings of being excluded as a linguistic outgroup. The study employed an online survey involving 370 Chinese full-time employees. Findings indicate that employees’ self-perceived negative workplace gossip is negatively associated with their OBSE, both directly and indirectly through feelings of social exclusion. Gossip targets’ experiences of linguistic ostracism moderates both the direct and indirect relations, such that a stronger perception on being linguistically ostracised lead to a higher effect of self-perceived negative workplace gossip on OBSE. As targets’ own perceptions of being gossiped is often subjective, this study provides novel implications for future studies on measuring the impact of negative workplace gossip from gossip target’s perspective, and calls for explorations of other possible moderating factors that can influence negative workplace gossip and gossip target outcomes. The study also provides managerial implications for fostering conducive organisational communication dynamics and language policies especially in multi-cultural and multilingual organisations.