Organisational Cynicism and Communication: “Onstage” and “Offstage”

Abstract

The aim of the study was to answer whether there is a relationship between organisational cynicism and communication. Organizational cynicism is considered to be an attitude towards those in power in an organization. Communication is analysed in its two aspects: “onstage”, where information is expected to be shared to achieve the company’s goals, and “offstage”, beyond the organizational rules and procedures, which mostly satisfies employees’ need for information. The flow of information is blocked “onstage” if employees keep silent and it flows freely offstage when they gossip. It was hypothesised that the cognitive aspect of the cynical attitude would predict negative gossip about superiors, and its affective aspect would predict employee silence. To verify the hypotheses, two correlational studies and one experimental study were conducted with participants recruited from different organisations (N = 472). The results showed that cognitive cynicism is related to an increase in negative gossip about a supervisor and partly support the expectation about relation between affective cynicism and employee silence. The results are discussed in the context of practical consequences of the relations between organizational cynicism and communication.