Spilling the Tea at Home: The Effects of Sharing Negative Work Gossip With One's Partner

Extant research primarily focuses on negative work gossip occurring within organizational boundaries. However, due to the social risks associated with sharing gossip in the workplace, employees alternatively share work gossip with their romantic partner at home. Drawing on the control perspective of repetitive thoughts, we examine how sharing negative work gossip with one's partner at home after work influences employees’ subsequent behaviors toward the gossip target at work the following day, as well as how the partner's response impacts those influences. We specifically propose that sharing negative work gossip with one's partner elicits both maladaptive repetitive thoughts (in the form of affect-focused rumination) and adaptive repetitive thoughts (in the form of problem-solving pondering). These distinct cognitive processes, in turn, exert opposing effects on employees’ interpersonal behaviors toward the gossip target, including their social engagement and helping behavior. Additionally, we propose that the partner's reframing response plays a moderating role by attenuating the maladaptive consequences of negative work gossip while enhancing its adaptive consequences. We test our hypotheses across three complementary studies: a 10-day multi-source experience-sampling study, a recall-based experiment, and a vignette-based experiment. Results across these studies largely support our hypotheses. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.