The Role of Team Gossip in Mitigating the Detrimental Consequences of Team Abusive Supervision

Previous studies have found that team abusive supervision causes detrimental consequences for team effectiveness. Yet, they have provided little insight regarding what team members can do to alleviate these consequences. Drawing from the social functional theory of gossip and recent theoretical advancement in abusive supervision in teams, we identify team gossip—team members’ aggregated levels of engagement of negative gossip about the team leader—as an “antidote” for team abusive supervision and develop a novel theoretical model that accounts for its safeguarding role against the abusive leader’s adverse impact on team effectiveness. Specifically, we theorize that team gossip buffers the adverse effects of team abusive supervision on team outcomes, team performance and team voluntary turnover, via a dual-path mechanism: Aggressive team norms and affective team trust. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a multi-wave, multi-source field study with a sample of 111 work teams. The results largely supported our model, showing that team members’ negative gossip about the abusive team leader is a powerful tool to mitigate abusive supervision’s detrimental consequences for team effectiveness. We conclude with a discussion on the theoretical and practical implications.