Abstract This study investigates the connection between employees' experience of time-related work stress and their job performance, with a particular focus on the mediating role of their propensity to engage in negative gossip and the moderating role of their collectivistic orientation. The results based on multisource, threewave data from employees, their peers, and supervisors in Pakistani organizations show that an important reason that time-related work stress might diminish job performance is that employees expend significant energy discussing their negative evaluations of other organizational members with peers, possibly as a way to protect their self-esteem resources. This mediating role of gossip is also invigorated by employees' collectivistic orientation. For organizations, this study identifies a key mechanism - informal conversations with peers about the flaws of others in the organization - by which time-related stress prevents employees from allocating sufficient energy to completing their job tasks, and it reveals that this process is more likely among collectivistic employees.
