With the aggravation of workplace competition, an increasing number of employees encounter workplace"cold" violence. Workplace gossip, as a kind of workplace "cold" violence, is pervasive in various organizations. Most of the workplace gossip in China is negative due to its cultural influence. Though workplace negative gossip has a negative effect on the organizational behavior of employees, few studies have paid attention to it and investigated its operation mechanism.The research involves 360 valid samples from Shandong Province. To avoid the problem of the common method bias, we collect three waves of data, the common method bias is not significant in the research. SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 are used to analyze the data. We introduce the organizational identification as a mediating variable and the neuroticism as a moderating variable, thus, a moderated mediation model is built to explore the relationship between workplace negative gossip and proactive behavior. Our hypotheses are empirically tested by hierarchical regression and bootstrap method. The empirical results indicate that:(1) Workplace negative gossip has a direct negative effect on the proactive behavior. (2) Workplace negative gossip can indirectly affect proactive behavior through organizational identification, which is a mediator, that is to say, organizational identification partially mediates the relationship between workplace negative gossip and proactive behavior. (3) Neuroticism moderates the relationship between workplace negative gossip and organizational identification, the negative effect is stronger when neuroticism is higher. (4) The mediating role of organizational identification in the relationship between workplace negative gossip and proactive behavior is moderated by neuroticism. In other words, the mediating effect of organizational identification is stronger only when the level of neuroticism is high.Above all, the study enriches the theories about the relationship between workplace negative gossip andproactive behavior and this may give impetus to the future research. In addition, our conclusions provide useful references for enterprises in China.
