‘You Didn't Hear it From Us But…’: Towards an Understanding of Rumour and Gossip in Organisations

Abstract

This paper investigates an important topic in organisational behaviour that hitherto, has not received enough attention—informal communications, including grapevine activity, rumour and gossip. We show how this topic can illuminate potential new insights in a range of related areas in organisational behaviour. We further outline an agenda for research on rumour and gossip in organisations, paying careful attention to a number of individual-level and organisational-level variables. Finally, methodological issues and ways of collecting data are considered; we suggest that many research techniques can be usefully employed in the study of rumour and gossip.