Hypothesis 2a: Gossip Would Increase Stress Level of the Gossiper

hypothesis 2a: gossip would increase stress level of the gossiper

Gossipers, who acknowledge some norms are violated during the process of gossiping, would have an augmentation in stress level due to the experience of self-blaming and guilt. Mostly do gossips, especially the negative ones, involve revealing private information of the victim, if not disseminating humiliating messages among them. Infringing the privacy of the target, either deliberately or unintentionally, would trigger a sense of guilt to the gossiper (O’Connor 1999) since gossipers, under normal circumstances, understand that violating the privacy norm is regarded as inappropriate(Bok 1983), this would result in provoking a drastic increase in the stress level to the gossiper. The effect of rocketed stress level would be more obvious and prominent when the victim have no opportunity to clarify the content of the gossip and defend themselves (Holtgraves 2001), which may further intensify the impacts on the stress level of the gossiper.

Gossipers would feel stressful after spreading the gossip since they would no longer be as popular as before. Turner(2003) illustrated that gossipers are normally disliked even when he is disseminating positive gossip, not to mention how annoying it would be if the gossips are negative in nature, particularly when their motives are self serving (Wilson 2002). Always do people perceive gossipers to attain personal goals unscrupulously in order to merely gratify their self interests. Furthermore, people would be worried that they may be the next victim of gossip and have a collapse in the reputation, they generally develop a negative impression to the gossiper, defending themselves from unfavorable rumors. As a result, the gossipers would be disliked, the trust level among their coworkers certainly deteriorates, some would even be socially isolated at workplace. All these, without doubt, would be a remarkable stressor to the gossipers, stimulating the stress level to rise.

Hypothesis 2b: High stress level lead to a decreased working performance

Elevated stress level, which narrows down attention, would inhibit working performance. Staal (2004) revealed that the ability of multi-tasking decreases when one is stressed or tensed. His focus would be forced to shift from secondary tasks to the sole primary task (Beal, Weiss, Barros, & MacDermid, 2005). The overall performance and interest of the company will be harmed if the secondary tasks are of paramount importance. In most work, dividing attention simultaneously to various pieces of work is indeed inevitable, especially to those managing executives. As a result, the narrowed attention to work due to the increased stress level would require more time to accomplish all the tasks, lowering the efficiency and hence the overall performance at work.