IMPACTS OF INFORMAL KNOWLEDGE SHARING (WORKPLACE GOSSIP) ON ORGANISATIONAL TRUST

The relationship between organisational trust and informal knowledge sharing is a rarely researched area. This is especially true in the case of workplace gossip, which acts as a channel of informal knowledge sharing. The aim of the research is to point out that although there is a strong positive relationship between organisational trust and knowledge sharing, the special form of informal knowledge transfer/sharing (workplace gossip), refuting earlier research findings, does not always produce a positive effect. In the first part of the two-phase quantitative research (it was done in 2019), trust and its conditions, tools and their place in the organisational hierarchy were identified through questionnaire surveys, and then the existence of informal knowledge transfer/sharing (workplace gossip) and its impact upon organisational trust were analysed. The hypotheses were tested on the basis of an own theoretical model using one and multi-variable statistical methods with the SPSS 25 and NVivo 12 content analysis software. The results show that while confidence building is supported by high quality real-world professional knowledge transfer/sharing, but workplace gossip, especially including fake information, has the opposite effect, which negatively influences organisational performance.