Office Gossip and Minority Employees in the South African Workplace

This book examines how employees from marginalized communities handle office gossip and provides recommendations to corporate leaders regarding how to support their marginalized employees better. Office gossip is a phenomenon that is omnipresent in the workplace and experienced by minority employees at all levels within the organization in different ways. Gossip is felt more acutely by minority employees compared to their majority counterparts at certain occupational levels and this book provides an empirical basis for understanding this phenomenon in organizational settings based on the experiences of marginalized workers. The chapters uses a variety of research methods to examine various aspects of the experience of office gossip among marginalized employees including: perceptions of diverse groups regarding workplace gossip, workplace gossip within teams, intersectional experiences of employees from racial minority and LGBTQ+ communities and foreign nationals, experiences of managers from racial minority backgrounds, and experiences in specific fields such as sport and healthcare. This book is of interest to students and researchers of diversity studies, organization research, human resource management, and industrial psychology as well as an important resource for corporate leadership and human resource and DEI departments in corporate organizations.