Investigating the Constructs of Psychosocial and Organizational Gossip Behavior

Research shows that people engage in positive and negative gossip by a variety of reasons and different purposes, that resulting in different outcomes. Also, negative gossip has a positive correlation with mental fatigue, depersonalization, and Care less than optimal, and has a negative correlation with job commitment and patient safety culture. But the question is, are the dimensions and components of gossip in organizational environment different from the social environment? The purpose of this study is to identify the latent variables in gossip behavior and determine its underlying factors.  The method of this research is a combination method. In the first stage, the gossip items were retrieved using interviews and library studies. In this step, coding of the categories and classifications was carried out and then, with the exploratory factor analysis approach, the initial constructs of the gossip were obtained. Samples were selected in three stages and in each step by purposeful and random sampling, and after obtaining organizational gossip constructs, their relationship with social desirability Stober(2001), Machiavelli's behavior Allsopp(1991) and Organizational Trust Measurement (Nyhan and Marlowe, 1997) were investigated.   The results represent the 7 dimensions of organizational gossip. Identified factors with an internal correlation of 0.7, explain 37% of the total variance and have an acceptable alpha coefficient.   Dimensions of the model are different with the gossip models in the community and managers should consider the gossips content in the organization different from the gossips in the community.