The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes

From boardrooms and brown bags, to emails and earnings calls, business culture often seems overrun by “corporate bullshit,” a type of semantically empty or otherwise vague rhetoric that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a way that misrepresents or obscures some aspect of organizational reality. Though corporate bullshit may sometimes seem harmless, it can disrupt organizational and employee effectiveness in numerous ways including obstructing effective communication, increasing employee disengagement, tarnishing company reputation, and exposing businesses to legitimate financial and legal risks. Here, results from three studies (N = 745) report the construction and validation of the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a novel measure of individual differences in receptivity to corporate bullshit. Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech. Moreover, it is significantly associated with measures of analytic thinking and other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is strongly associated with several measures of organizational culture and job performance and is a strong, robust predictor of work-related decision-making. Overall, the findings establish the CBSR as a valid and reliable tool to aid researchers in examining the causes, correlates, and consequences of bullshit in the workplace.