This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale is an attempt to quantify “organizational bullshit,”
This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS) using two samples of employees of organizations in various sectors. The scale is designed to gauge perceptions of the extent of organizational bullshit that exists in a workplace, where bullshit is operationalized as individuals within an organization making statements with no regard for the truth. Analyses revealed three factors of organizational bullshit, termed regard for truth, the boss and bullshit language. The three factors are consistent with existing literature in the field of organizational bullshit and offer further insight into how employees view workplace bullshit. The OBPS constitutes three subscales measuring these factors. Future researchers should seek to validate the OBPS and further develop the identified factors of organizational bullshit.
The authors first define what they mean by bullshit, which captures the approach of quite a few people I’ve worked with over the years,
The word bullshit can therefore be both a verb (the act of communicating with no regard for the truth), and a noun (the information contained in that which is communicated with no regard for the truth). Bullshit can be expressed in writing (e.g., emails, memos, reports), in spoken form (e.g., conversations and speeches), and visually (e.g., charts, diagrams). It is important to distinguish between bullshit and lying. While liars care about the truth, know it, and deliberately misrepresent it, bullshitters neither know nor care whether something they communicate is true or not. As bullshitters don’t care what the truth is, this affords them freedom to say whatever it takes to further their agenda.
The Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale breaks bullshit down into three factors:
- An organization’s overall regard for truthful communications
- Subordinates’ view of an organization’s leaders tendency to communicate truthfully
- An organization’s tolerance for “bullshit language” such as largely meaningless corporate jargon and buzzwords
From a scholarly perspective, the OBPS provides a way to delve further into this important concept, its nature, and its antecedents and consequences. Our findings suggest that employees are attuned to the presence of bullshit in organizations, and their attitudes, beliefs, and actions are likely to be influenced by their perceptions of it. Of course, further theoretical and empirical work is needed to tease out the varying ways in which bullshit influences organizational outcomes, and we hope our scale can be of use in that regard. From an applied perspective the OBPS provides a simple checklist for human resource practitioners to use to diagnose both the actual prevalence of organizational bullshit, as well as the extent to which employees believe it is present in an organization.