Someone brought up this topic at a site that I visit. I wrote a lengthy response and just decided to reblog it.

I've noticed that the backstabbing, gossip, and manipulation gets worse as you go down our company hierarchy.

I swear, you could put the data on a chart and would be amazed at the correlation between a group of employees' position in our company and the amount of gossip and backstabbing that goes on within it.

It's so bad with our lower-level employees (I hate to call them "lower-level," especially in this context, but that's where they are in our company) there's so much gossip and lies. They spend so much time bitching and complaining and gossiping. It's annoying.

With our supervisors, there's still gossip, but it's tolerable for me. What I hate is actually seeing people gossip and our supervisors don't do that...as much. But, on the other hand, it's almost as bad as the lower-level employees, because our supervisors are more sneaky about it, because they know that upper management frowns on gossip. So, that's where the backstabbing and manipulation comes in. They try to get other supervisors to turn on other supervisors. They forget to tell other supervisors about important meetings. It's crazy. If they would just focus on their jobs.

That's what upper management does. Our upper management team does have older employees, with the exception of three, whose personalities aren't that of the type of people who spend their days gossiping. So, maybe it's not the level of the employee, it's the employee's character and ethics.