Prior research has found that abusive supervision climate is detrimental to team effectiveness by contaminating team members’ interpersonal processes. Yet, a critical question remains largely overlooked: What can alleviate these harmful consequences? Integrating the social functional perspective of negative gossip with research on abusive supervision, we develop a theoretical model that explains how leader-directed negative team gossip—the extent to which team members share negative gossip about the team leader’s behaviors with each other—plays a critical buffering role. We specifically argue that leader-directed negative team gossip alleviates the harmful influence of abusive supervision climate on team performance and team voluntary turnover by mitigating its detrimental impacts on team aggressive behavior and team affective trust. Hypotheses are tested with a field study of 111 work teams using a multi-wave, multi-source, and round-robin design. The results largely support the model, showing that leader-directed negative team gossip reduces 1) the indirect negative effect of abusive supervision climate on team performance through increasing team aggressive behavior and 2) its indirect positive effect on team voluntary turnover through decreasing team affective trust. We conclude with discussions of theoretical implications for understanding abusive supervision and workplace gossip.

Keywords: abusive supervision, negative gossip, team aggressive behavior, team affective trust, team effectiveness