A project meeting wraps up, one colleague steps out of the room, and another leans in to complain about how the absent teammate handled the presentation. Almost 90% of employees admit to engaging in office gossip, and with remote and hybrid work splitting teams across different communication channels, private side conversations are easier to start than ever.
For employees hoping to move up the ranks, these casual gripe sessions present a dilemma. A new study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examines how talking behind a teammate’s back shapes a worker’s chances of becoming an informal leader. The research reveals that the career fallout of office gossip depends heavily on gender: men who gossip face much harsher penalties to their perceived competence and leadership potential than women who say the exact same things.
The double standard of office chatter
In many workplaces, particularly on self-managed project teams, there is no single boss calling the shots. Instead, teams go through a process known as leadership emergence, in which one or more members naturally gain influence and are informally granted a leadership role by their peers.
Prior research has offered conflicting views on whether negative gossip helps or hurts this rise to leadership. Some scholars argue that complaining about an absent colleague helps groups bond, enforces team standards, and warns peers about difficult coworkers, all of which could make the gossiper look like a savvy leader. Other studies suggest that gossip erodes trust and stirs tension, making the speaker appear petty and unfit to lead.
Andrea L. Hetrick of the University of New Mexico and her colleagues suspected that the gender of the person gossiping could explain these contradictory findings. To investigate, they drew on role congruity theory, a psychological framework that explains how people are evaluated based on whether their actions match societal stereotypes for their gender.
Society holds distinct unwritten rules, known as prescriptive gender stereotypes, dictating how men and women ought to behave. Men are generally expected to act assertively, independently, and directly, while women are expected to be communal, relationship-oriented, and subtle.
In most studies of bad workplace behavior, these expectations work against women. Female managers who yell at subordinates or act unfairly face much harsher backlash than male managers because overt aggression violates the expectation that women should be kind and cooperative.
Hetrick and her colleagues argued that negative gossip flips this dynamic. Because talking behind someone’s back is an indirect, relational way of exercising influence, it aligns more closely with stereotypical expectations for women. For men, however, venting to a third party rather than confronting a problem head-on violates the expectation to be direct and dominant, potentially making male gossipers look weak and ineffective.
Testing gossip in real teams
The researchers designed three studies to test whether a gossiper’s gender changes how competent their teammates think they are, and whether those competence judgments then determine who emerges as a leader. Following established psychological definitions, they defined competence as the degree to which a colleague is viewed as capable, efficient, organized, and skillful.
In their first study, the researchers tracked 272 undergraduate business students divided into 63 self-managing teams at a large public university in the United States. The teams worked together over a full semester on a consulting project that accounted for 30% of their final course grade.
Six weeks into the semester, the students completed a survey reporting their gender and how frequently they had engaged in negative gossip about an absent teammate, such as venting about a peer’s actions, criticizing a teammate, or questioning a colleague’s abilities to another group member. Four weeks later, every student rated their individual teammates on competence and leadership behavior.
Even after accounting for how often teams met and how long members had known each other, a clear gender divide emerged. For men on the project teams, gossiping had no statistically significant connection to how competent their peers thought they were.
For women, more frequent gossiping was linked to higher competence ratings from their teammates. Those higher competence ratings, in turn, were strongly linked to teammates viewing those women as emerging team leaders.
Isolating cause and effect
While observing student teams offered a look at ongoing group dynamics, survey data alone cannot prove that gossip directly causes changes in peer perceptions. To establish cause and effect, Hetrick and her colleagues conducted two experiments with full-time American workers.
In the first experiment, 188 full-time employees read a scenario asking them to imagine working on a six-month advertising campaign at an insurance company. In the story, a meeting had just ended, a teammate named Alex stepped out of the room, and another coworker, named either Michael or Ashley, started talking about Alex.
Half of the participants read a neutral version in which Michael or Ashley simply passed along a message from Alex about the dates and location of an annual conference. The other half read a negative gossip version in which Michael or Ashley complained that Alex had repeatedly interrupted people during the meeting, calling the behavior unacceptable and questioning Alex’s reliability.
After reading the passage, participants rated the speaker’s competence and leadership potential. When Michael gossiped about Alex, participants rated him as significantly less competent than when he shared neutral conference details, and this drop in competence was in turn linked to lower leadership ratings. When Ashley made the exact same complaints about Alex, her competence and leadership ratings did not suffer at all compared to the neutral condition.
To see if this pattern held up in real workplace memories, the researchers ran a second experiment with 260 full-time employees. Participants were randomly assigned to recall and write at least 100 words about a real interaction from the past month involving either a male or female colleague in their work group.
Half of the workers were prompted to write about a time their colleague vented about, criticized, or questioned the abilities of an absent coworker. The other half wrote about a time their colleague discussed routine logistics for an upcoming meeting or event.
When evaluating real coworkers from memory, participants penalized both men and women for gossiping compared to discussing meeting logistics. However, the drop in perceived competence was roughly twice as severe for male gossipers as it was for female gossipers, which again led to a much steeper decline in leadership ratings for the men.
What this means for teams and managers
Across all three studies, men who gossiped were consistently rated as less competent and less leader-like than women who gossiped, though the exact pattern shifted depending on the setting. In the semester-long student teams, women appeared to benefit from gossip while men saw no effect; in the two experiments, men were actively penalized while women faced either no penalty or a much smaller one.
The researchers suggest that familiarity and context explain this difference. In real, ongoing teams, members have a history with one another and can judge a gossiper’s tone, relationship history, and the meaning of the situation, which softens their reliance on broad stereotypes. When coworkers have less context, as in the brief experimental scenarios or isolated memories, evaluators are more likely to fall back on rigid gender norms that punish men for indirect behavior.
These findings carry practical lessons for organizations that rely on self-managed teams, flat hierarchies, or peer reviews to identify future managers. Because informal social habits can trigger gender biases that distort how a worker’s actual skills are viewed, the authors recommend that companies give teams structured, objective criteria for evaluating leadership, such as how well a teammate plans work, coordinates tasks, and solves problems.
The authors also advise managers and team members to separate the person speaking from the purpose of the message. Negative gossip is not always malicious; it can serve practical group functions, such as warning teammates about a colleague who is shirking duties or violating workplace norms. If peers automatically write off a man’s competence because he raises a concern indirectly rather than confronting a difficult coworker head-on, the team may ignore valid warnings and misjudge his actual leadership abilities.
The researchers note a few boundaries to their work that leave room for future investigation. Their studies focused mainly on negative gossip about work tasks and job performance, rather than personal rumors about a colleague’s private life. In addition, they did not test positive gossip, such as praising an absent teammate behind their back, leaving open the question of whether men who share indirect praise might still face a penalty simply for communicating in an understated, indirect way.
