One in every seven corporate email is gossip: study

US social scientists analysed hundreds of thousands of emails from the former Enron energy trading giant, but say the findings could apply to any big company anywhere.

They found 14.7 per cent of the corporate emails could be called gossip, because the content concerned people who were not among the recipients.

And being negative outnumbers the positive messages by nearly three to one, the Daily Mail reported.

Eric Gilbert, assistant professor of the School of Interactive Computing, said it is estimated that the average corporate email user sends 112 emails every day.

About one out of every seven of those messages can be classified as gossip but it's not necessarily a bad thing, he said.

"I was a little surprised that it turned out to be almost 15 per cent. But then again gossip is something we all do in every aspect of our lives. Gossip gets a bad rap. When you say 'gossip', most people immediately have a negative interpretation, but it's actually a very important form of communication," he said.

"Gossip is generally how we know what we know about each other, and for this study we viewed it simply as a means to share social information," he added.

Every level of worker gossiped, but the lower ranks gossip the most.

The researchers analysed language used in some of the 600,000 messages available for study from Enron, which went bankrupt in 2001.

They found 'negative gossip' was 2.7 times more prevalent than 'positive gossip'.

Just as with face-to-face gossip, they found gossip on emails serving the same four main purposes of providing information, entertainment, intimacy and influence in both business and personal relationships.

The researchers divided the emails among seven layers of Enron hierarchy, from rank-and-file office employees all the way up to presidents and CEOs, and found gossip emails flowing within and among nearly every level, with the heaviest flow among the rank-and-file.