Information dissemination via electronic word-of-mouth: Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster!

Are we truly wicked when gossiping at work? The role of valence, interpersonal closeness and social awareness

“…Gossip senders thus tend to make a good impression on their interlocutors, hoping that they will reciprocate the behavior in the future by supporting their own ideas or defending their own actions at work with the ultimate aim to maintain group solidarity and functioning (Ellwardt et al, 2012). As Hornik et al (2015) highlight, this kind of behavior is frequent also in word-of-mouth consumers, who tend to transmit positive information rather than negative information for self-presentation and self-enhancement purposes. Given that the distinction between positive and negative gossip might parallel the one between non-malicious and malicious gossip in that both communicate news in favor vs. against the gossip target, we expect the above-mentioned argument to be valid also for the non-malicious gossip.…”

“…Studies of word of mouth have demonstrated that differences in the formulation of the message lead to different reactions of individuals (e.g., Alexandrov, Lilly, & Babakus, 2013;Berger & Milkman, 2012;Packard, Gershoff, & Wooten, 2016). The popular beliefs about gossip and the general confusion about rumors lead people to think that negative news is more likely to be transmitted than positive news (i.e., negativity bias, see Hornik et al, 2015). Nonetheless, researchers have also posited that positive information is more frequently diffused than negative information since the source of the message may gain social rewards (Berger & Milkman, 2012).…”

“…Despite the wide array of studies existing on gossip (see Wu, Birtch, Chiang, & Zhang, 2016 for recent research), what type of information co-workers share the most when gossiping and the related purpose are not well established. Indeed, extant contributions have shown mixed results: while some have demonstrated that negative news is more likely to be shared (e.g., Hornik, Satchi, Cesareo, & Pastore, 2015), others have highlighted that people prefer to pass on positive information (e.g., Berger & Milkman, 2012). Further, most research examines gossip valence as being positive vs. negative (e.g., Ellwardt, Labianca, & Wittek, 2011;Wu et al, 2016), thereby leaving room for studying further valenced nuances, such as the gossip maliciousness.…”

Dynamic changes in the use of online advice in response to task success or failure

“…Hence, negative affect could be associated with a failure to take up systems (Schwark 2015), the propagation of complaint within networks (Hornik et al 2015), and impairments in cognitive control (Engelhardt, Hilgard, and Bartholow 2015).…”

Making sense of consumers’ tweets

“…Therefore, eWOM and user-generated contents (UGC) emerge as key drivers for consumers' buying decisions (Gensler et al, 2015;Lee et al, 2012). For these reasons, a large body of literature investigates the effect of eWOM on sales (King et al, 2014), other authors tried to identify the effect of positive or negative online comments/posts/reviews (Hornik et al, 2015;Li et al, 2013;Pang and Qiu, 2016;Yang et al, 2015), the best strategy to influence consumers' positive eWOM (Erkan and Evans, 2016;Reamer et al, 2016), consumers sentiments towards a certain brand (Mostafa, 2013); and consumers' reactions towards the firm's participation in their online conversations (Homburg et al, 2015), while other studies have further considered using online consumers' rates of tourism attractions as predictors of their future behaviour . Thus, the online contents generated by consumers in terms of reviews, ranking and ratings largely convey more information than reputation, in other words they reflect the product quality and popularity of a certain product, brand or service (Li et al, 2013;Liang et al, 2015;Tsekouras, 2017).…”