Do you have a nosy coworker? BU research finds snooping colleagues send our stress levels rising

(Press-News.org) They’re a common office menace: the nosy coworker. They read over shoulders, loiter as friends chitchat, ask uncomfortable personal questions. It can be tempting to duck for cover whenever you see them heading your way.

But separating the prying and obtrusive from the merely curious and concerned can be challenging. What one person considers nosy, another might think is friendly; some people are open books, others like to keep their personal lives private.

Those blurry lines aren’t just issues for the 9-to-5 crowd to navigate, they’ve been a thorny problem for researchers studying intrusive behavior and employees’ privacy boundaries. Until now, says Boston University organizational psychologist Richard A. Currie, there’s been no reliable way to measure, or even define, workplace nosiness, making it hard to track its potentially negative effects. His research aims to change that, and his latest project started with surveys of 350 young adults about nosiness—asking them what it means to be nosy at work, how nosy colleagues act, how often nosiness occurs.

In a series of four studies, Currie has come up with a set of common nosiness characteristics, developed a way to measure workplace intrusiveness, and tested whether nosiness levels are predictors of an employee’s performance and satisfaction. The research was conducted with Mark G. Ehrhart of the University of Central Florida and published in the Journal of Business and Psychology. They found one-third of people reported seeing someone being nosy at work at least weekly; a similar proportion said they spotted it every month.

I think we all have been in situations where others felt entitled to our feelings, ourselves in some way,” says Currie, a BU School of Hospitality Administration assistant professor of organizational psychology. “What really sparked my interest in workplace privacy is this modern push for authenticity—it sounds healthy to bring your whole self to work, but it seems like it’s almost eroding boundaries between professional and personal lives. That creates pressure, discomfort, perhaps burnout and stress—I wanted to explore that tension a little bit.”

How Do You Measure Nosiness?

Over the course of two studies—and with further input from expert reviewers and surveys with working adults—the researchers isolated themes from the answers given by the 350 subjects, such as chronic questioning and gossip/drama, to create a nosiness scale (see “How Nosy Are Your Colleagues?”). The scale, which allows survey respondents to quantify a colleague’s intrusiveness, has measures of professional and personal nosiness—seeking information about what happens while on the clock versus trying to weasel out details about life outside of work.

“If you think of nosiness not as a behavior necessarily,” says Currie, “but as a perception or an appraisal of someone else’s information-seeking behaviors, there’s a lot of individual variables—personality, hostile biases—that could determine why someone is more or less likely to perceive someone else as being nosy.”

In their paper, the researchers define workplace nosiness as “employees’ intrusive attempts to obtain private information from others at work.”

Defining nosiness is a really big step forward,” says Currie. “We came to a firm definition of how it’s different from other related constructs—like social curiosity—that in and of themselves don’t necessarily have overly negative implications; nosiness does, so it truly is a distinct phenomenon.”

In the third and fourth studies, the researchers aimed to test how that negativity might impact employee well-being and performance. They found employees react to nosiness by pulling down the shutters—“tightening their privacy boundaries through hiding knowledge from their nosy coworkers,” according to the journal article. In companies rife with prying colleagues, stress levels were higher, while task performance and knowledge-sharing with colleagues were lower. The researchers also separately concluded that workplaces perceived to have a competitive psychological climate—with everyone vying for an advantage over their coworkers—correlated with higher levels of nosiness.

“Interestingly, we found that younger workers reported engaging in nosy behaviors more than older workers did,” says Currie. “I find that to be a fascinating finding. I do wonder if that translates to generational differences—not only in your likelihood of engaging in nosiness or being appraised by others as being nosy, but also how you appraise and respond to others.”

Authentic Supervisors Encourage Sharing

Currie has already tested his nosiness scale in a hospitality scenario, publishing a paper in the International Journal of Hospitality Management on how supervisor inquisitiveness about personal lives impacts frontline restaurant staff. Exploring nosiness’ effects is something he’d like to do more of.

“We found workers’ shared supervisor nosiness perceptions negatively impacted employee perceptions of interpersonal justice, which ultimately reduced their likelihood of engaging in knowledge-sharing behavior,” says Currie. “We also found that when supervisors were more authentic and trusted more, that weakened the negative relationship between nosiness and interpersonal justice, leading to more knowledge-sharing.”

Since starting this work, Currie says he’s been more aware of his own inquisitiveness—when it’s appropriate, when to dial it back. “Being the nosiness researcher, you can’t be nosy,” he says. It’s also shaped his leadership classes to future hospitality managers, helping him speak to students about their biases and motivations when they’re interacting with others, “exposing my students to this understanding that people are really complex.”

As for what to do when confronted with the office’s nosy neighbor, Currie says that’s a subject for a future study. But he does offer one final insight.

“People are interesting and, naturally, all of us want to know more about the people we encounter regularly,” he says. “Sometimes, I find myself being overly curious about what others in my workplace and outside of work are doing, so I do keep in check my nosiness behaviors. But I’d also like to believe that I’m not policing others’ information-seeking.”

 

*This research was supported in part by a graduate student award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

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