Combat poison with “poison”: Leader-targeted negative team gossip mitigates the detrimental team consequences of abusive supervision climate.

Existing research presents mixed perspectives on the impact of abusive supervision climate on team processes and effectiveness. This discrepancy prompts an important question: when, why, and how does abusive supervision climate become more or less detrimental to teams? By integrating the social functional perspective of gossip with recent theoretical advancements on abusive supervision climate, we develop a novel theoretical model to explain how leader-targeted negative team gossip-defined as the extent to which team members share negative evaluations of the leader's behaviors with each other when the leader is absent-can mitigate the adverse effects of abusive supervision climate on teams. Our model posits that leader-targeted negative team gossip serves its social function in two key ways: (a) It diminishes team members' perception of the leader as a role model, thereby reducing the influence of abusive supervision climate on team aggressive behavior, and (b) it fosters perceived similarity among team members regarding their negative attitudes toward the leader, which lessens the impact of abusive supervision climate on team affective trust. We further argue that these buffering effects of leader-targeted negative team gossip have significant downstream implications for team effectiveness, specifically in terms of team performance and team voluntary turnover. Our model was tested using two multiwave, multisource field studies employing a round-robin design, with samples of 111 and 237 work teams, respectively. The results largely supported our model. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).