Continuing my research interest during the doctoral study in group dynamics of work teams, this proposal is aimed at understanding and analyzing the social psychological atmosphere of teams. My doctoral research recently unraveled that team members’ identification with and affective commitment to the team were positively associated with work outcomes, furthermore, such team members were more willing to act altruistically and share knowledge. These findings underline the necessity of not only understanding the social psychological atmosphere of teams, but also analyzing and reconstructing it in order to build more effective teams. Unlike most empirical research which focuses on team composition and work behaviors such as leadership, conflicts, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation, the purpose of this research is to pay more attention to the informal interactions and undercurrents among team members in order to delineate potential social functions of gossips in work teams. We will attempt to find out how gossiping as a form of informal communication stirs group dynamism, how it makes team members consolidate their team identification, and whether it is associated with various work consequences. In other words, this study will explore the relationships between social functions of gossip, and team socialization, social isolation, team identification, work consequences. Social identity theory will be used as an overarching framework for this research guiding inferences of the relationships among variables.
