Is Workplace Gossip Good? A Study of 348 Teams Found It Buffers a Bad Boss.

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A new study of 348 work teams in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that when a boss is abusive, teams that gossip about that boss behind their backs take less damage than teams that stay silent. The buffering helped the team sustain performance and reduce voluntary turnover. 

The big insight: the team rallied together around overcoming the poor behavior of the bad boss. 

The researchers called it leader-targeted negative gossip, and they tested it across two field studies. Stanford’s Bob Sutton, whose bestseller The No Asshole Rule helped put abusive bosses on the corporate agenda, flagged the finding on LinkedIn as a rare case of gossip doing good. Sutton says he’s adding the research to his book’s 20th-anniversary edition, due out in 2027. 

It’s tempting to read all this as permission to let people vent around the water cooler. 

The more useful interpretation of the research is that gossip about a boss is a symptom, a sign the team is coping with a manager who is failing them. 

That reframes the question every leader should ask: what’s the gossip about this manager actually telling you about the culture of the organization? 

Why Venting Buffers the Blow 

The study points to two mechanisms, and both are about behavior. When a team openly criticizes an abusive boss, people stop treating that boss as a role model. The negative view stays contained at the top of the team and stops short of shaping how colleagues treat each other. They blow off steam through gossip, which softens the blow of the boss’s behavior. 

The second mechanism is solidarity. Comparing notes reassures each person that the boss is the core problem. That shared understanding protects trust between teammates even as trust in the leader collapses. 

The buffering is real, but so are its limits. Teams under abusive bosses still suffered strain. They suffered less, however, which is what coping mechanisms help to do. 

Gossip’s Downside 

None of this makes gossip a healthy behavior. 

Left unchecked, it curdles into cliques, rumors, and even bullying. It can hurt people who had nothing to do with the bad boss. The researchers make no case for spreading it. They’re just describing how things work. Sutton has spent two decades arguing that the real fix is removing the abusive boss. 

I’ve spent two decades advising leadership teams at companies like Disney, Visa, and Cisco. My book, The Invisible Advantage, is all about how culture is created every day by the behaviors of all employees, from the front line to the board room.  

The gossip that results from bad managers is often a symptom of a larger problem. Here’s how leadership should treat any symptom like this so it doesn’t infect the broader organizational culture: 

1. 1. View gossip as data. When you hear gossip directly, or learn that gossip is occurring, don’t assume the gossip itself is the problem. Determine if it’s a coping mechanism for a bigger issue that needs addressing. 
   2. Provide coaching. As you gain insight into the issues being gossiped about, provide people with coaching on how to better cope. And, of course, provide coaching to the bad manager to address the source of the gossip itself. 
   3. Eliminate gossip. Even gossip that’s a coping mechanism is a symptom of a problem. Work to quash the root causes of gossip so that communication is open, transparent, and addresses issues head-on. 

Underneath the discomfort of employees badmouthing a boss may be a team taking care of itself the only way it can. This week, notice which manager keeps surfacing in hallway conversations and resist the urge to police the talk. And if you are the one worn down by a difficult boss, lean on people you trust to stay grounded while you build a plan to change your situation. 

A team that gossips about its boss may be coping with something real. The leader’s job is to fix what they’re coping with.