Corporate “bull----” – buzzword‑heavy, vague language common in strategy decks, town halls and performance reviews – may be doing more than irritating employees. New research indicates it can obstruct clear communication, distort how staff perceive leaders and, critically, is linked to poorer workplace decision‑making.
In a series of regression analyses that controlled for job satisfaction, trust in supervisors and perceptions of transformational leadership, a study out of Cornell University found that one factor stood out as the strongest drag on judgment: how much employees are impressed by empty corporate jargon.
“Corporate bull---- receptivity (CBSR) emerged as the only significant predictor (negative) of decision‑making performance,” according to the research paper. In a replication using a shorter version of the scale with a more highly educated corporate sample, job‑related decision‑making was again “significantly, negatively predicted by CBSR‑10 scores,” while receptivity to real corporate statements and clarity of job expectations were positive predictors.
The results come from the Corporate Bull---- Receptivity Scale (CBSR), developed by Shane Littrell of Cornell’s Department of Government and detailed in Personality and Individual Differences. Tested across four studies with 1,018 employed adults in Canada and the United States, the CBSR is described as “a novel measure of individual differences in susceptibility to corporate bull----.”
Littrell defines corporate bull---- as “a semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way.” According to the paper, this kind of language can disrupt organisational effectiveness, increase disengagement and create reputational, financial and legal risks.
To build the scale, Littrell used an Excel‑based “corporate bull---- generator” that algorithmically produced grammatically correct but meaningless statements modelled on Fortune 500 executive quotes. Employed participants who reported to a supervisor rated how much “business savvy” each statement expressed on a five‑point scale.
Twenty generated statements were mixed with 10 real quotations from senior corporate figures. Factor analysis showed responses grouped into two distinct dimensions: receptivity to corporate bull---- and receptivity to genuine corporate speech, providing “initial evidence that receptivity to corporate bull---- is a unique factor distinct from mere affinity for real corporate speech.”
The final tool consists of a 20‑item full scale and a 10‑item short form, the CBSR‑10, both with high internal reliability. That gives researchers – and potentially practitioners – a concise way to quantify how strongly employees are swayed by vacuous yet impressive‑sounding corporate language.
Some of the commonly heard phrases at work are becoming cultural icks for employees, according to a separate study.
Follow‑up work connected high CBSR scores with weaker cognitive performance. Corporate bull---- receptivity was “negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking,” including actively open‑minded thinking and fluid intelligence. It was also positively related to the self‑reported frequency of “persuasive bull----ting” – using vague or inflated language to impress or persuade others.
By contrast, general receptivity to ordinary corporate speech did not show the same negative profile. Littrell concludes that “more cognitively sophisticated workers are not simply less receptive to corporate speech overall. Instead, they are specifically less impressed by corporate bull----, even after accounting for their evaluations of genuine corporate statements.”
For HR, that distinction suggests that heavy reliance on buzzword‑driven communication may resonate most with employees who are less inclined to scrutinise messages critically and more likely to use similar rhetoric themselves, reinforcing a cycle of style over substance.
To some Canadians, using business lingo helps with understanding others (22%) and makes them think the speaker is knowledgeable (21%). However, it can also have a negative effect, according to a previous Preply study.
Although employees high in CBSR tended to report greater job satisfaction, stronger trust in supervisors and more inspiration from corporate mission statements, they also performed worse on objective decision‑making tests. The paper warns that “the unfettered spread of corporate bull---- in an organization can backfire in several ways,” from misinterpreted directives to the loss of high‑quality staff who tire of obscure messaging.
Littrell argues that the CBSR offers “a valid and reliable tool to aid researchers and practitioners in examining the causes, correlates, and consequences of receptivity to bull---- in organizations,” but stresses it is “not intended as a substitute for validated measures of cognitive ability,” and any high‑stakes HR use would require further validation.
The study concludes that the influence of corporate bull---- “can range from benign to ruinous,” underscoring the importance for HR of promoting clear language – and being cautious about rewarding those who rely on impressive‑sounding but empty corporate talk. For people leaders, that may mean coaching executives to strip back unnecessary jargon, encouraging employees to question unclear messages and aligning recognition more closely with evidence‑based decisions rather than rhetorical flair.
“I have a simple rule: if you cannot explain something in plain English and [in] such a way that a 5th grader can understand it, you don't understand it yourself,” says Duncan McClure, an engineer turned program manager, in a LinkedIn post.
“It’s why excessive use of corporate jargon gets on my nerves.”
