Systematic literature review of workplace gos-sip and foreign nationals

Abstract

Purpose: This research sought to explore and systematically review the landscape of literature on the topics of workplace gossip and foreign nationals, in order to cre-ate an aerial shot of the areas of investigation favoured by researchers, the methods employed for inquiry, theories applied to the subject matter and finally openings in research for expansion and in-depth examination. Method: A total of 50 initial articles were drawn from elected databases. The data-bases included, Emeralds insight, Google scholar, Oxford, Taylor Francis, PubMed, Research gate, Sage, the South African journal of industrial psychology Springer link and Wiley online. Keyword searches were iteratively formulated, tracked and repli-cated for searches of each database. The yielded articles were originally pitted against predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria; this was done through a prelimi-nary review of the articles’ abstracts. The articles were subsequently grouped based on their research aims. The findings were written out in prose and presented a snap-shot of workplace gossip and foreign national research in the last decade. Findings: A number of themes were raised through the review process. Prosocial gossip works as an informal discipline system, though the processes of isolation and ostracism. Gossip is a viable tool for social control. Organisational identity and low power interact and also result in lower tendencies to gossip as a means of indirect aggression while high power and low organisational identity result in contrary effects. Greater employee identification with the organisation results in superior perceived cohesion. Job related gossip has an influence on employee cynicism and has a me-diating effect on the relationship between abusive supervisors and cynicism. Psycho-logical contract violation is a predictor of job-related gossip and employee cynicism while the presence of an abusive supervisor predicts both job-related and non-job related gossip. Furthermore, non-whites in white-dominated organisations, racial mi-norities and women experience gossip perpetrated by dominate groups. Dominant groups use gossip to discredit, undermine, exact group exclusion, communicate slurs, communicate subjective evaluations as truth, promote negative talk and opin-ions that minorities do not belong at the top of organisations. Minorities respond in two manners, by acquiescing or avoiding confrontation. Regarding immigrant eco-nomic assimilation, immigrants earn 34% less than their native counterparts. Immi-grants experience greater levels of unemployment than the country natives. Interestingly, immigrants seem to sort into low paying organisations. Moreover, longer re-ported occupation in a host country determines annual increases in pay of around 0.9%. Even more so, immigrants who work at majority native organisations report higher earnings. Residential location plays a role in earnings as the discrimination effect, means employers have biases about who they employ based on their residen-tial address. The relationship between immigrant-native isolation and exposure to immigrant neighbours is negative. Immigrants face barriers to integration through the non-recognition of their qualifications and perception of lower productivity. Employers favour local qualifications and accreditations over those held by immigrants. On the contrary, in some instances local qualifications seem to be considered sporadically and immigrants are put up against lesser qualified natives who are part of the organ-isations racial majorities when seeking career advancement. Immigrants assimilate through focusing on the following behaviours, work-related professional culture, un-derstanding workplace. Non-work related: higher exposure to natives in residential neighbourhoods and intermarrying with locals. Literature displayed that the words immigrant and expatriate are synonyms; however, in the existing international man-agement literature they describe two starkly different groups. Expatriates focused on in management literature are male, of Anglo-Saxon decent, hail from developed countries in North America or Western Europe. On the other hand, immigrants are male and female, hail from developing countries, are racial minorities, earn low wag-es and work in feminized roles that are unskilled and semiskilled. Regarding em-ployee wellness, findings showed that job satisfaction is an indicator of wellbeing. Furthermore, job satisfaction has been connected to organisational commitment in employees and has a negative relationship with employee absenteeism and employ-ee inclination to turnover. In general job satisfaction promotes positive behaviours and limits the negative. Environmental factors, job characteristics and work specific personal factors are just three referenced work-related factors linked to immigrant job satisfaction. Recommendations for future research: A definite need is an empirical enquiry into whether foreign nationals are targets of gossip. Though in light of the current study, this seems to be eminent that there is a need for evidence driven commentary re-search. Another suggestion is inquiry into how gossip influences the wellbeing of foreign nationals. Finally, I recommend exploring the question on what impact; gossip has on foreign national assimilation