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 semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational settings that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way. At best, corporate bullshit can sometimes seem harmless. At worst, it can disrupt organizational and employee effectiveness in numerous ways including obstructing clear communication, increasing employee disengagement, tarnishing a company’s reputation, and exposing businesses to potential financial and legal risks. Here, results from four studies (total N = 1022) report the construction and validation of the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a novel measure of individual differences in susceptibility to corporate bullshit. Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate language and 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 robust predictor of work-related decision-making. Overall, the findings establish the CBSR as a valid and reliable tool to aid researchers and practitioners in examining the causes, correlates, and consequences of receptivity to bullshit in organizations.