The omnipresence of workplace gossip makes understanding gossip processes imperative to understand social life in organizations. Although gossip research has recently increased across the social sciences, gossip is conceptualized in disparate ways in the scientific literature. This conceptual confusion impedes theoretical integration and providing practical advice. To resolve this, we systematically reviewed 6114 scientific articles on gossip and identified 324 articles that define gossip. From these definitions, we extracted two essential characteristics of gossip on which there seems to be agreement within the literature, namely, (1) that gossip is communication between humans involving a sender, a receiver, and a target, and (2) that the target is absent or unaware of the communicated content. These two characteristics formed the basis of a broad, integrative definition of gossip: a sender communicating to a receiver about a target who is absent or unaware of the content. Furthermore, some definitions include characteristics on which there is less agreement: gossip valence (from negative to neutral to positive) and formality (from informal to intermediate to formal). We incorporate these characteristics in a dimensional scaling framework that can guide future research. Our broad, integrative definition of gossip and the dimensional scaling framework provide the building blocks for a systematic, integrated knowledge base on the role of gossip in human social life in general as well as in organizations. This can foster future theory development and hypothesis testing, ultimately helping organizations to manage gossip.

工作场所八卦的无处不在使理解八卦过程成为了解组织中的社会生活所必不可少的。尽管最近八卦研究在整个社会科学领域都有所增长，但是八卦在科学文献中却以不同的方式被概念化。这种概念上的混乱阻碍了理论的融合和提供实用的建议。为了解决这个问题，我们系统地回顾了6114篇关于八卦的科学文章，并确定了324篇定义八卦的文章。从这些定义中，我们提取了八卦的两个基本特征，文献中似乎对此达成了共识，即（1）八卦是人与人之间的通信，涉及发送者，接收者和目标，并且（2）目标不存在或不知道所传达的内容。发送者与接收者交流有关缺少或不知道内容的目标的信息。此外，一些定义包括较少一致的特征：八卦价（从消极到中立到积极）和形式（从非正式到中级到正式）。我们将这些特征整合到一个可以指导未来研究的尺寸缩放框架中。我们对八卦的广泛，综合的定义和维度扩展框架，为基于八卦在整个人类社会以及组织中的角色提供了系统的，综合的知识的基础。这可以促进未来的理论发展和假设检验，最终帮助组织管理八卦。