Coping with negative workplace gossip: The joint roles of self-monitoring and impression management tactics

Abstract

Although researchers have examined the effects of negative workplace gossip on target employees’ work-related behavior, it remains unclear when and how personality traits play a role between negative workplace gossip and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Drawing upon the transactional model of stress and coping, we posit a mediated moderation model of the effects of self-monitoring and impression management tactics on the relationship between negative workplace gossip and target employees’ OCB. By collecting supervisor-subordinate dyadic time-lagged data, we demonstrated that the relationship between negative workplace gossip and OCB was weaker when employees were high self-monitors. In addition, we found that the moderating effects of selfmonitoring were mediated by the use of impression management tactics.