Socially rewarded or penalized at work? The mixed reputational implications of disclosing one’s positive nonwork events on social evaluations and workplace gossip.

Abstract

Existing research implicitly assumes that disclosing one's positive events-known as capitalization-is socially valuable in the workplace because such events are work-related and therefore relevant to coworkers and organizational goals. Indeed, management research has focused on how disclosers of positive work events and their coworkers feel about themselves. Broadening the focus of workplace capitalization to disclosure of positive nonwork events, which we refer to as nonwork-work interpersonal capitalization, we draw from boundary theory to investigate whether disclosers gain and/or lose social value at work because such capitalization is evaluated against normative expectations around the work-nonwork boundary. Specifically, we theorize that nonwork-work interpersonal capitalization carries mixed reputational implications for disclosers in terms of how they are evaluated by coworkers (i.e., perceived as other-focused and/or distracted from work) and, in turn, how coworkers spread evaluative information of disclosers to others (i.e., in terms of positive and/or negative workplace gossip about disclosers). Moreover, we propose that such reputational implications will be moderated by the discloser's workplace status. We test our model using a source- and time-separated field study (Study 1) and an experimental causal chain design (Study 2). Both studies showed that disclosers of positive nonwork events are more likely to be perceived as other-focused and thereby become targets of positive gossip. Across both studies, the effect of nonwork-work interpersonal capitalization on being perceived as distracted was stronger for lower status employees, who in turn were more likely to be gossiped about negatively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).