When you have a direct communication culture, you need to counterbalance it with the notion of tact and respect because otherwise you might engender a confrontational culture, and people might beat each other up, and they can claim they were just being direct. A number of companies seem to have more of that than others. I've seen scores of highfalutin mission statements and value charts at tech companies. Then we go further and say what values should be included in that core statement. There's always drama that follows.
Toxic gossip sounds like a heavy-metal band from high school.
Toxic gossip is because people care about their work, but they're frustrated in trying to solve a problem and all other communication paths are blocked. They want to talk about what's going on, even if the person they're talking to can't provide answers. The vast majority of tech workers aren't senior executives or cowboys, yet they spend eight or 10 hours a day in a random organization. That's a great question. The key is to live by the closure and commitment principles and only engage in direct communication.