Case Study: Office Gossip. Do You Act on Rumor or Respect Privacy?

“Office Gossip. Do you act on rumor or respect privacy?” It was easy for me to make a choice in between the two cases. Gossip is much more palpitating for me, especially gossip about somebody’s private life. It is maybe due to my female nature or maybe due to different attitude towards this matter in my ex Soviet Union culture. After reading the case I felt myself completely in the same shoes with a manager. I respect his hesitation and the “softness” of his leadership style. I know I would feel the same way: totally confused.
The particularly relevant details of the case, in my opinion, are pretty simple and, from the first glance, are quite obvious: rumors about one of the key salesperson’s love affair with a client, this person’s feelings and right to privacy together with her right to happiness, and other team members’ attitude towards this issue. I am not sure that the fact that there is no proof for the affair is relevant. There is no smoke without fire. The whole mess and noise around the matter reminds me a lot how this kind of issues were handled in the Soviet Union. People felt obliged to report about immoral behavior to the Communist Party Committee. Than it was a team meeting called to revile publicly “the victim” for such a “bad behavior”. I never believed that this kind of public “execution” had anything to do with intent of improving human nature. Was the intention of it to support the morale or to limit our privacy? I think it just was giving the participants a sense of rightness and satisfying their desire to touch somebody else’s “covert” life. Human nature can’t be changed. There are always moments of weakness and temptation out there as well as reasons justifying our actions in eyes of ourselves and people capable to forgive. But on the other hand, the quantity of divorces sharply increased since unfaithfulness stopped being publicly rebuked.
It is not as easy to uncover the real conflict here because there are a lot of