In 2014, an executive vice president of Microsoft Devices Group laid off 12,500 employees in an email so riddled with buzzwords and corporate vagaries it made headlines as “the worst email ever.” “Our device strategy must reflect Microsoft’s strategy and must be accomplished within an appropriate financial envelope,” read one such mind-numbing passage.
If you’re scratching your head, you’re not alone. To cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell of the University of Cornell, this vacant mishmash of business jargon constitutes “corporate bullshit.” Now, new research from Littrell published in Personality and Individual Differences points to a troubling relationship between corporate BS and employee performance.
“Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” Littrell explained in a statement.
Corporations are fertile ground for bullshit, Littrell says, thanks to practices like euphemistic performance feedback, group meetings encouraging ignorant employees to share opinions, ambiguous, virtuous-sounding mission statements, and an overall desire to project confidence.
In his research, Littrell was careful to distinguish corporate bullshit from technical jargon. While both are somewhat esoteric—alienating outsiders and bonding insiders—technical jargon actually communicates useful information to in-groups, whereas corporate bullshit is more vapid bluster.
“Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies,” Littrell said. “It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
So is corporate BS just an organic outgrowth of harmless team-oriented cheerleading, or does it represent something more insidious?
Read more: “Propaganda Doesn’t Have to Be a Dirty Word”
To find out, Littrell created a “corporate bullshit generator” capable of producing confident sounding yet ultimately meaningless phrases like “we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “by getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
During the course of four studies, Littrell asked hundreds of office workers to rate the business savvy of these nonsense statements in order to create a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale measuring their susceptibility to BS. He then had participants complete a battery of tests designed to evaluate their cognitive abilities.
Littrell found that office workers who were more susceptible to corporate bullshit were more likely to rate their bosses as charismatic and visionary. Unfortunately, they were also more likely to score lower on analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. Basically, what made them model team members could also make them less effective employees.
“This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “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. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
While it’s tempting to believe we’re the smart employees who would never be taken in by this kind of bluster, Littrell offers caution.
“Most of us, in the right situation, can get taken in by language that sounds sophisticated but isn’t,” Littrell said. “That’s why, whether you’re an employee or a consumer, it’s worth slowing down when you run into organizational messaging of any kind—leaders’ statements, public reports, ads—and ask yourself, ‘What, exactly, is the claim? Does it actually make sense?’”
But just like manufacturing corporate bullshit, it might be easier said than done.
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