Admiration or envy? How observers’ reactions to workplace helping behavior influence their gossiping?

Purpose By focusing on bystander perceptions, this study aims to investigate how observed workplace helping behavior elicits gossip through admiration and envy and how competitive relationships shape these emotional pathways. Design/methodology/approach This research comprised two studies: (1) a two-wave survey of 416 employees with a one-week interval to mitigate common method bias, and (2) a 2 × 2 scenario-based experiment involving 341 participants, in which observed workplace helping behavior and competitive relationships were manipulated to test causal effects. Findings The results indicate that admiration mediated the relationship between observed workplace helping behavior and positive gossip, while envy mediated the relationship between observed workplace helping behavior and negative gossip. Moreover, competitive relationships negatively moderated the positive pathway but did not significantly influence the envy pathway. Originality/value By highlighting how observers’ admiration and envy toward helpers give rise to positive and negative gossip, this study introduces an emotional-evaluative lens to workplace helping behavior and reveals that third-party emotional reactions play a key role in shaping how prosocial behavior is perceived and interpreted in the workplace.