Research On The Influence Of Workplace Negative Gossip On Work Engagement

With the increasing complexity and competition of workplace environment,workplace violence has attracted the attention of management practice.Compared with visible workplace "hot violence",workplace "cold violence" seems invisible,but its harm can not be underestimated.Workplace negative gossip is a typical workplace "cold violence",which is common in employees’ work life.It will constantly consume employees’ individual resources,cause them negative interpersonal interaction experience,trigger negative emotions,increase their psychological distress and have a series of negative effects on their subsequent work attitude and behavior.It will ultimately affect work performance and organizational development.At present,scholars have conducted many researches on workplace negative gossip,but most of them focus on the field of employee behavior and there is a lack of research on the relationship between workplace negative gossip and work engagement.Therefore,this study will explore the mechanism and boundary conditions of workplace negative gossip on employees’ work engagement.From the perspective of employees’ psychological perception,based on the resource conservation theory and the affective event theory,this study introduces psychological distress as a mediating variable and affective leadership as a moderating variable and constructs the mechanism of the impact of workplace negative gossip on employees’ work engagement.Taking employees in Heilongjiang Province,Jiangsu Province and Guangdong Province as research samples,the data were collected through questionnaire survey.The analysis software SPSS.22 and AMOS.21 were used to analyze the collected 305 valid samples to demonstrate the relationship between workplace negative gossip,psychological distress,work engagement and affective leadership.The results show that the workplace negative gossip has a significant negative impact on employees’ work engagement;psychological distress has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between workplace negative gossip and employees’ work engagement.Affective leadership plays a moderating role in the relationship between psychological distress and employees’ work engagement,which not only negatively moderates the influence of psychological distress on employees’ work engagement,but also moderates the indirect effect of workplace negative gossip on employees’ work engagement through psychological distress.The innovations of this study are as follows:(1)using psychological distress as a mediating variable,it further reveals the internal transmission mechanism of the relationship between workplace negative gossip and employees’ work engagement and enriches the empirical research on psychological distress in the field of organizational behavior.(2)By introducing affective leadership as a moderating variable,this paper explores the regulating mechanism of the influence of workplace negative gossip of affective leadership on employees’ work engagement and confirms that in addition to individual factors and organizational factors,affective leadership,a positive leadership style,can also have an impact on employees’ work status,which supplements the content in this field.