Lot of these study’s like these are gonna get "no shit. " responses here
I came here to find and upvote the first “no shit” response. You win!
When people throw around corporate BS terms like “blue sky thinking,” “synergistic leadership,” and “end state vision,” their goal is clear. They want to sound smart and sophisticated. But according to a new study, they are actually inadvertently revealing the exact opposite with their love of empty jargon.
The new research from Cornell University organizational psychologist Shane Littrell confirms what buzzword haters have always suspected. People who eat up meaningless corporate speak also tend to be bad at practical decision making and analytical thinking.
In short, the more you love corporate BS, the less well you’re likely to perform at work.
This isn’t Littrell’s first adventure in studying jargon. He’s apparently a man on a quixotic quest to try to hold back the flood of BS inundating American offices. His previous research showed that the old saying “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” is actually false. Those who spread BS also tend to buy it.
This time around Littrell wanted to ask another question. BS-ers might fall for others’ nonsense more readily. But how do they perform at work? If you tend to be impressed by “architecting solutions” and “bleeding-edge innovation,” are you more or less likely to be good at your job?
To figure this out, Littrell developed something called the “corporate bullshit receptivity scale.” Using AI, he generated meaningless but fancy-sounding business jargon. (Example: “This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are de-contenting and avoiding reputational deficits.”) Then, he asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the business savvy of a mix of these nonsense sentences and substantive quotes from Fortune 500 CEOs.
Finally, he also tested study subjects on their analytical reasoning, fluid intelligence, and practical decision making, as well as asked them about their satisfaction with their jobs and company leadership. What did he find?
Remainder:
People who were most impressed by corporate BS were unsurprisingly also more likely to see their leaders as “visionary.” (All they need to be impressed is a hail of random buzzwords, after all.) They were also more likely to be satisfied at work. But this contentment came at a cost. They also performed worse on the various tests of cognitive and work performance.
Here’s how Cornell Chronicle summed up the results: “Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by ‘visionary’ corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.”
Don’t let your company get buried in empty jargon
Confirming that lovers of corporate BS are often not the sharpest operators at the office might cause a little mean-spirited glee among jargon haters. It is satisfying to have scientific confirmation that the people who annoy you might not actually be all that bright.
But once you stop cackling wickedly, the study actually flags up a serious concern for business leaders. These results highlight how BS can snowball as those who are impressed by empty rhetoric admire, hire, and promote like-minded bloviators.
“Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell warns. The end result is a corporate BS death spiral.
How to fight back against corporate BS
Imprecise, empty language leads to unclear communication and bad decision making. The results are often not funny at all. So what should leaders do if they see a tendency toward corporate BS beginning to creep into their companies? When I asked Littrell, he offered several suggestions.
First, forget trying to ban BS. It won’t work.
“Unfortunately, bullshit and bullshitting are unavoidable. It’s just part of human behavior, especially in competitive environments,” Littrell explains. Technical jargon used appropriately can be useful, he also points out, further complicating the idea of issuing a blanket jargon ban.
Instead, it is “more productive to focus efforts on rewarding ‘anti-bullshit’ behavior,” he continues. This means making “communicating with clarity” a company norm and modeling clear communication from the top.
“If senior executives communicate in ‘bullshitty’ ways, then everyone else will too,” Littrell warns. “They should normalize clearly defining their terms, focus on shorter, to-the-point sentences, and resist using ambiguous buzzwords.” Rather than announce you are “focusing on our strategic realignment,” say “here’s what we’ll start doing differently on Monday.”
Finally, reward people for asking questions. “Publicly praise good-faith attempts at clarification (e.g., ‘Thanks! That’s a great question. Let me rephrase this in a clearer way …’),” Littrell says. When performance review time rolls around, make sure to explicitly credit employees for things like “communicating clearly,” “flagging empty claims,” and “turning ambiguity into actionable plans.”
If all else fails, leaders may need to force employees to speak plainly through the use of “anti-BS templates that force company-wide messaging into straightforward concrete claims (what is true/what will change), observable metrics (how will we know if X works?), and specific timelines,” he concludes.
The corporate BS receptivity scale isn’t ready for prime time
What you probably should not do as a leader is use Littell’s “corporate bullshit receptivity scale” to evaluate candidates or employees. At least not yet.
“The scale is a promising tool for researchers, but it’s not quite ready yet to be used as a high-stakes screening instrument by private companies,” Littrell clarifies. “We still need to investigate it more robustly first.”
While we’re waiting for a miracle tool that can detect and blast away meaningless jargon, this study offers a helpful step forward in the battle against corporate BS. First, it confirms what many of us have long suspected. High-falutin’ words are generally not a sign of high performance. Quite the opposite. They can also be catching.
That means leaders need to be vigilant against the spread of corporate BS and take decisive action to root it out when they start to see it spread.
Hey, thank you. I guess my reader mode truncated it.
No worries.
I had to click the “Expand to Continue Reading” tab/button to see the rest of the article. Don’t use reader mode too often, so I’m not sure if it is a common issue you have to worry about, hopefully not.
Great research. Now do it for the people who parrot the term, “Anti-woke.”
“My ask is…” 🤮🤮🤮
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I can’t access the full research paper, but from what I remember, I thought younger and more junior employees were much more likely to use corporate jargon and buzzwords to compensate for their lack of experience/ knowledge. I wonder if this research controlled for relevant years of experience.
