The role of grapevine in the social interplay of employees on-thejob: its implications to work performance

Abstract

Informal communication is a natural part of organizations. Studies about grapevine have gained interest in the recent years, for it is known to provide advantages and disadvantages in the workplace and organizations respond to it in different ways. Due to the personal nature of grapevine and the social interactions that occur through it, the grapevine becomes a medium for the social interplay process. It allows for employees to identify or fuse themselves with groups, which leads to belongingness, connectedness, unity, collaboration, communication, networking, and interpersonal relationship among workers. This study describes the role of grapevine in the process of social interplay and how, as such a phenomenon happens, employees' work performance is influenced. The Social Exchange Theory has been used as the framework for this study with the cost-reward analysis as a technique in examining the implications of grapevine's roles towards employee work performance. The research site is Liberty Insurance Corporation, a relatively small private company where 11 participants were interviewed using the maximum variation technique of purposive sampling. Age, gender, job position, term/tenure in the company, and department were taken into account. A semi-structured interview was conducted inside the private rooms of the research site. In the study, the roles of grapevine were identified as follows: (1) motivation, which pertains to happiness and relief, moves the grapevine towards social interplay; (2) condition, which pertains to personal matters and work-related experiences, pulls social interplay towards the grapevine; and (3) interaction, which pertains to discussing and verifying, where employees engage in objective dialogue or open discourse. If the identified motivations and conditions occur through the identified methods of interaction, then employees would be able to foster a healthy, meaningful grapevine, where each of its functions is used to the organization's advantage. Findings also show that the employees of Liberty Insurance Corporation, as the subjects in this research, appear to know how to utilize the grapevine to their benefits, as revealed by the said participants' positive perspectives on the roles of grapevine in the social interplay process. Nevertheless, this study has identified the implied advantages and disadvantages of grapevine that impact work performance in terms of the timeliness, quantity, quality, need for supervision, and cooperativeness of the employees through the cost-reward analysis.