Rumor is a circulating information that can have a significant effect on people’s lives. It can be true or false and is usually spread through word of mouth, like in the game of Chinese whispers. It can have positive or negative consequences, depending on its content and whether it is meant to be supportive or threatening. It is also important to understand that rumor is often based on assumptions, beliefs or desires. It is a way for people to fill information voids and make sense of their worlds.
While it might seem that rumors are simply trivial gossip, social science research shows that rumor can have serious real-world implications. In fact, rumor can have a significant impact on the decisions we make and how we feel about our lives and the people in them.
For example, in the case of electoral processes, rumors can cause confusion and mistrust among voters, skewing electoral results. In a business context, rumors can damage reputations and even destroy entire businesses. The challenge is to create an online environment in which healthy skepticism can coexist with trust, and where community and connection do not come at the expense of truth.
In the case of our research, we were interested in how rumours evolve in a particular workplace setting and what factors influence their development. It turns out that management actions play a key role in this respect. When managers communicate in a way that is unclear or offers insufficient explanations of incidents, this can generate rumours that offer other explanations and may thus contribute to the creation of distrust. Managers’ ability to moderate emerging discussions and to normalise situations can also help to avoid rumours from spreading.
The emergence of a rumour and its progression through the organisation can be explained by two components: ambiguity (personality and situational) and information importance. Rumours with a lot of ambiguity can be very difficult to verify and tend to focus on specific individuals. Rumours with a lot of information importance are very believable and often touch on anxieties that many employees might share.
Our research showed that rumours are not only an important source of informal information, but can also function as an effective tool for building trust between managers and staff members. This is because rumours can provide a more detailed picture of the workplace than official statistics, which do not have a dynamic relationship with rumours and are therefore hard to interpret.
Rumours can be a valuable source of knowledge, but only if they are interpreted in the right way. It is essential to develop a dynamic relationship between formal and informal information and to keep this in mind when planning management interventions. This will help to reduce the amount of rumour and to use it to enhance cooperation and trust between the different actors in the workplace. As a result, it is possible to achieve better working conditions in the long term and a high level of productivity.