Investigating rumor and gossip as types of informal communication in schools according to teacher views

This research examines the views of teachers in public primary schools on rumor and gossip as types of informal communication. Organizational rumor can be defined as informal conversations circulating among the employees of the organization towards an event. Organizational gossip can be defined as informal evaluative speech about people who are not ready. The focus of this research is to examine the organizational effects of the rumor and gossip circulating among the teachers and accordingly reduce the harmful aspects and develop strategies to use the beneficial aspects of them in accordance with organizational goals. In this study descriptive and relational survey models were used. The population of the research consists of public primary school teachers working in Turkey. The sample of the research consists of 1907 teachers working in 16 provinces. The research data were collected using "Organizational Rumor Scale" developed by Dağlı and Han (2018) and "Organizational Gossip Scale" developed by Han and Dağlı (2018). Some important findings of the research are: The mean of the teachers' views related to organizational rumor's dimensions of getting information ( = 2.57) and socialization ( = 2.37) is in the level of "I do not participate"; for the dimension of cynic effects ( = 3.56) the mean is in the level of "I do participate". There is no significant difference among the views of the teachers in terms of "marital status" and "educational status". There is significant difference in terms of "gender" variable in the dimensions of socialization; in terms of the "professional seniority" variable in the dimensions of getting information, socialization and cynic effects; in terms of "school size" variable in the dimensions of getting information, socialization and cynic effects; in terms of the "use of social media" variable in the dimensions of getting information, socialization and cynic effects. The effect size of these statistical significant differences is low (ŋ2 <0.06). The mean of the teachers' views related to organizational gossip's dimensions of having information ( = 2.59) and developing relations ( = 2.38) is in the level of "I do not participate"; for the dimension of organizational harms ( = 3.57) the mean is in the level of "I do participate". There is no significant difference among the views of the teachers in terms of "gender", "marital status" and "educational status". There is significant difference in terms of "professional seniority" variable in the dimensions of having information, developing relations and organizational harms; in terms of "school size" variable in the dimensions of developing relations and organizational harms; in terms of the "use of social media" variable in the dimensions of having information and organizational harms. The effect size of these statistical significant differences is low (ŋ2 <0.06). In the research, correlation analysis show significant correlations between the dimensions of organizational rumor and gossip.