Tending the Grapevine

Employers who hope to conceal such impending changes as layoffs, work cutbacks and personnel shifts might just as well give up: the word will get to their employees on the company grapevine. So concludes Keith Davis, a professor of management at Arizona State University, who has been studying office and factory rumors for 20 years. "With the rapidity of a burning powder train," Davis asserts, "information flows out of the woodwork, past the manager's door and the janitor's mop closet, through steel walls or construction-glass partitions." Moreover, "well over three-fourths" of company rumors are accurate.

According to Davis, people underestimate the reliability of the grapevine because its misses are more dramatic than its hits. That was the case, Davis says, when a factory grapevine reported that a worker had lost his hand in a machine-shop accident; in fact he had suffered only minor cuts on two fingers.

But even inaccurate scuttlebutt may convey a psychological truth, because many rumors are "symbolic expressions of feelings." "If rumor says that Joe is quitting, this may mean that his associates wish he would quit," or it may reflect a general--but sometimes unconscious--awareness that Joe desperately wishes he could quit.

Whether it spreads truth or falsehood, whether it transmits "smoke signals, jungle tom-toms, taps on the prison wall or ordinary conversation," a grapevine is bound to develop wherever people congregate. But employers can keep false rumormongering at a minimum by telling the truth and telling it early. Increasingly, Davis reports, wise managers are trying "to feed, water and cultivate the grapevine" themselves.

They may as well, Davis concludes, because the grapevine "cannot be abolished, rubbed out, hidden under a basket, chopped down, tied up or stopped.

It is as hard to kill as the mythical glass snake which, when struck, broke into fragments and grew a new snake out of each piece."

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