Search

This study investigates the co-evolution of friendship and gossip in organizations. Two contradicting perspectives are tested. The social capital perspective predicts that friendship causes gossip between employees, defined as informal evaluative talking about absent colleagues. The evolutionary perspective reverses this causality claiming that gossiping facilitates friendship. The data comprises of three observations of a complete organizational network, allowing longitudinal social network analyses. Gossip and friendship are modeled as both explanatory and outcome networks with RSiena. Results support the evolutionary perspective in that gossip between two individuals increases the likelihood of their future friendship formation. However, individuals with disproportionately high gossip activity have fewer friends in the network, suggesting that the use of gossiping to attract friends has a limit. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We adopt a relational approach to examine the effects of social relations and formal structure on who speaks up to whom about problems at work. Data were collected in a two-wave employee survey in three Dutch preschools. Using exponential random graph modeling, we found significant positive effects of formal structure (recipient's hierarchical level; team co-membership) and good relations between speaker and recipient on the likelihood of voice in a dyad. Speaker's hierarchical level had positive effects. significant in Wave 1. Speaker's degree centrality significantly reduced the likelihood of voice, whereas recipient's degree centrality had no effect. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.