The Hidden Tax: How Organizational Bullshit Undermines Performance, Wellbeing, and Trust

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Abstract: This article examines organizational bullshit—communication with no regard for truth—and its pervasive effects on workplace performance and employee wellbeing. Drawing on the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS) developed by Ferreira et al. (2022) and broader scholarship, the analysis reveals three core dimensions through which bullshit manifests: organizational disregard for truth and evidence, leadership communication practices, and the use of obfuscating language. Research suggests that while bullshit may occasionally inspire through visionary language, it more frequently corrodes decision-making quality, erodes trust in leadership, reduces job satisfaction, and creates climates of cynicism. Evidence-based organizational responses include establishing transparent communication norms, implementing procedural justice mechanisms, building critical-thinking capabilities, redesigning operating models to reduce incentives for bullshitting, and supporting psychological safety. Long-term resilience requires recalibrating psychological contracts, distributing accountability for truth-telling, anchoring purpose and belonging, and embedding continuous learning. Organizations that confront bullshit systematically can enhance decision quality, employee engagement, and sustainable performance.

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted" (Frankfurt, 2009, inside cover). This observation, while blunt, captures a reality increasingly evident in organizational life: bullshit—communication made with no regard for truth—has become commonplace in many workplaces. From inflated job titles and meaningless corporate slogans to evidence-free assertions in meetings and jargon-laden memos, organizational bullshit pervades contemporary work environments (McCarthy et al., 2020; Spicer, 2017).

The stakes are significant and urgent. Research suggests that organizational bullshit can reduce job satisfaction, increase distrust in leadership, diminish productivity, and ultimately impair organizational performance (McCarthy et al., 2020). It separates talk from action, suppresses dissent, and corrodes the quality of decision-making—potentially putting jobs, competitiveness, and even organizational survival at risk (Spicer, 2017). Yet despite these potential consequences, bullshit remains under-researched and under-addressed in organizational practice.

This article synthesizes emerging scholarship on organizational bullshit to provide practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and actionable strategies for addressing it. We examine how bullshit manifests in organizations, its measured consequences for performance and wellbeing, evidence-based interventions that organizations have deployed successfully, and longer-term capabilities required to build resilience against bullshit. The analysis draws on the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS) developed by Ferreira et al. (2022), which identifies three key dimensions of organizational bullshit: regard for truth, the boss (leadership communication), and bullshit language. By understanding these dimensions and their effects, organizational leaders and HR practitioners can diagnose bullshit in their own contexts and implement targeted interventions to reduce its prevalence and impact.

The Organizational Bullshit Landscape

Defining Organizational Bullshit in the Workplace Context

Organizational bullshit, building on philosopher Harry Frankfurt's (2009) seminal work, refers to communication that occurs "when colleagues make statements at work with no regard for the truth" (McCarthy et al., 2020, p. 254). The term "bullshit" functions as both verb (the act of communicating without caring about truth) and noun (the content of such communication). Critically, bullshit differs from lying: liars know the truth and deliberately misrepresent it, whereas bullshitters neither know nor care whether their statements are true (Frankfurt, 2009). This indifference to truth actually gives bullshitters more communicative freedom than liars, as they can say whatever serves their immediate purposes without the constraint of needing to know what is actually true (McCarthy et al., 2020).

In workplace settings, bullshit manifests across multiple communication channels—in emails, reports, presentations, conversations, and visual materials like charts and diagrams (Ferreira et al., 2022). Common forms include:

• Misrepresentation: Leaders making confident assertions without knowing the underlying facts

• Inflated credentials: Resume padding and exaggerated qualifications (Grover, 2005)

• Empty slogans: Corporate mission statements and values that lack genuine meaning or connection to practice (Lee et al., 2020)

• Bullshit jobs: Positions with titles that obscure actual work or whose existence serves primarily ceremonial functions (Graeber, 2018)

• Jargon and buzzwords: Language like "blue-sky thinking," "low-hanging fruit," or "drinking the Kool-Aid" that sounds impressive but conveys little substantive meaning (McCarthy et al., 2020; Spicer, 2017)

The OBPS research reveals that employees are highly attuned to bullshit in their organizations and can distinguish among its key dimensions (Ferreira et al., 2022). This awareness matters because employee perceptions shape their responses to organizational bullshit, which McCarthy et al. (2020) categorize into four types: exit (trying to escape the bullshit, potentially by leaving), voice (confronting it), loyalty (embracing and spreading it), and neglect (disengaging). These responses have clear implications for retention, innovation, culture, and productivity.

Prevalence, Drivers, and Distribution

While systematic prevalence data remains limited—a gap that instruments like the OBPS can help address—qualitative evidence and anecdotal accounts suggest bullshit is widespread across industries and organizational types (Christensen et al., 2019; Spicer, 2017). Certain structural and cultural factors appear to increase bullshit prevalence:

• Expectation to have opinions: When organizational norms demand that people always have answers or perspectives, particularly on complex or uncertain matters, bullshitting becomes more likely (Petrocelli, 2018)

• Low accountability for accuracy: When statements face minimal scrutiny or consequences for being wrong, bullshit flourishes (Petrocelli, 2018)

• Status and overconfidence: Leaders with high status, overconfidence in their knowledge, and perceptions of popularity are more prone to bullshit (Jerrim et al., 2019)

• Unknowledgeable audiences: When communicators believe their audiences cannot evaluate claims critically, bullshit increases (Petrocelli, 2018)

• Incentive misalignment: When rewards flow to those who appear knowledgeable or confident rather than those who are accurate, bullshitting is reinforced

• Organizational complexity: Larger, more complex organizations may create more opportunities for bullshit to spread unchallenged

The OBPS research found that organizational size correlated with higher bullshit perceptions, with 70% of respondents in one sample working in organizations with 250+ employees (Ferreira et al., 2022). This suggests that scale and bureaucratic complexity may facilitate bullshit, though more research is needed to establish causality. Industries with high technical complexity, information asymmetries, or weak external accountability mechanisms may also be more vulnerable.

Understanding that bullshit is not randomly distributed but responds to specific organizational conditions is crucial for intervention design. Addressing root causes—such as unrealistic expectations for leaders to have all answers, weak verification mechanisms, or perverse incentives—will be more effective than simply exhorting people to "be more honest."

Organizational and Individual Consequences of Organizational Bullshit

Organizational Performance Impacts

The effects of organizational bullshit on performance operate through multiple mechanisms, though empirical quantification remains an important research frontier. Key performance impacts include:

Degraded decision quality. Perhaps the most serious consequence, bullshit corrodes organizational decision-making by disconnecting decisions from evidence and reality (Spicer, 2017). When statements are made without regard for truth, decisions based on those statements will be poorly grounded. This can lead to strategic errors, operational inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and resource misallocation. Research on evidence-based management demonstrates that organizations making decisions grounded in the best available evidence—rather than anecdote, intuition, or unexamined precedent—achieve superior outcomes (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). Bullshit represents the antithesis of evidence-based practice.

Separation of talk and action. Spicer (2017) identifies that bullshit creates gaps between what organizations say and what they do. Mission statements proclaim values that daily practices contradict; strategy presentations outline initiatives that never materialize; leaders espouse priorities that resource allocation ignores. This decoupling undermines strategy execution and organizational alignment. Employees become cynical about stated intentions, reducing their commitment to organizational goals.

Suppression of dissent and diverse perspectives. When bullshit dominates organizational discourse, those with different views—particularly those grounded in evidence or experience—may be marginalized (Spicer, 2017). Jargon and buzzwords can serve as membership signals, excluding those unfamiliar with the "right" language. This suppression of voice reduces the organization's ability to detect problems early, correct course, and innovate. Psychological safety, critical for learning and adaptation, erodes when bullshit cannot be safely challenged.

Ignorance of established knowledge. Bullshit can lead organizations to disregard well-established findings and lessons, requiring them to "reinvent the wheel" or repeat past mistakes (Spicer, 2017). When decision-makers are indifferent to what is actually known—whether from research, prior experience, or industry practice—organizations lose the benefits of accumulated knowledge.

Misallocation of attention and resources. Bullshit jobs and meaningless titles waste talent and payroll resources on activities that create little value (Graeber, 2018). Bullshit communication consumes time in meetings, email, and reports that could be spent on productive work. The cognitive effort required to decode jargon-laden communication or navigate contradictions between rhetoric and reality represents a hidden tax on organizational capacity.

While rigorous quantification is needed, these mechanisms suggest that organizational bullshit can impose significant performance penalties. The magnitude of impact likely varies based on context—bullshit about long-term vision may be more tolerable than bullshit about short-term operational realities or scientific findings.

Individual Wellbeing and Stakeholder Impacts

Beyond organizational performance, bullshit affects individual employees and other stakeholders:

Reduced job satisfaction. McCarthy et al. (2020) found that higher perceptions of organizational bullshit correlated with lower job satisfaction. When employees perceive that their organization tolerates or rewards communication without regard for truth, their satisfaction with their work environment declines. This makes intuitive sense: most people prefer to work in environments characterized by integrity and honesty rather than deception or indifference to truth.

Increased distrust in leadership. The OBPS dimension "the boss" reflects employee perceptions of whether their leaders engage in bullshit (Ferreira et al., 2022). When leaders are perceived as bullshitting—saying whatever advances their agenda regardless of truth—they forfeit credibility and trust. Trust in leadership is foundational for employee engagement, change management, and organizational commitment (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002). Leaders who are seen as indifferent to truth will find it difficult to inspire followership, even when they are actually telling the truth on important matters.

Frustration and cynicism. Anecdotal evidence suggests that organizational bullshit is a significant source of employee frustration (Ferreira et al., 2022). Employees who recognize bullshit but feel unable to challenge it may become cynical about organizational life more broadly. Cynicism, in turn, reduces engagement, increases withdrawal, and can spread through social contagion.

Cognitive and emotional labor. Navigating an environment saturated with bullshit requires effort. Employees must decode ambiguous language, reconcile contradictions between statements and reality, and manage the stress of potentially having to enact decisions they know are poorly grounded. This represents a form of emotional labor that can contribute to burnout.

Ethical dissonance. Employees with strong personal values around honesty and integrity may experience moral distress when required to participate in organizational bullshit—whether by creating it themselves, remaining silent about it, or implementing decisions based on it. This dissonance can drive voluntary turnover among precisely those employees organizations most want to retain.

Impacts on external stakeholders. While research has focused on internal effects, organizational bullshit likely affects customers, investors, regulators, and community stakeholders. Misleading product claims, inflated financial projections, or misrepresentation of social or environmental impacts can harm these groups directly and erode trust in organizations more broadly.

The individual-level impacts are intertwined with organizational performance effects. Dissatisfied, distrustful, cynical employees are less productive, less innovative, and more likely to leave. High-performing organizations require not just efficient systems but also engaged people who trust their leaders and believe their work is meaningful. Bullshit undermines these foundations.

Evidence-Based Organizational Responses

Table 1: Organizational Bullshit Strategies and Real-World Applications

Intervention Strategy	Specific Tactics and Practices	Organizational Case Example	Primary Goal/Outcome	Root Cause Addressed (Inferred)
Establishing Transparent, Evidence-Grounded Communication Norms	Radical transparency, structured decision protocols (Five Whys), showing your work, and red team exercises.	Bridgewater Associates	Enhance decision quality and ensure assertions are routinely backed by data and logic.	Low accountability for accuracy and pressure to have opinions regardless of evidence.
Implementing Procedural Justice and Speaking-Up Mechanisms	Independent safety panels, documented technical dissents, and anonymous reporting channels.	NASA	Reduce penalties for challenging prevailing narratives and increase psychological safety.	Suppression of dissent and fear of retaliation for truth-telling.
Providing Financial Resilience and Support Programs	On-site childcare, flexible work, and generous benefits to increase employee security.	Patagonia	Support personal integrity and empower employees to prioritize doing what is right over job preservation.	Insecurity and anxiety that drive defensive bullshitting to protect one's position.
Building Critical Thinking and Bullshit-Detection Capabilities	Problem-structuring methodologies (MECE), hypothesis-driven analysis, and structured analytic techniques (SATs).	McKinsey & Company	Reduce the effectiveness of bullshit by increasing analytic thinking and domain knowledge.	Unknowledgeable audiences and cognitive biases in evaluating claims.
Redesigning Operating Models and Control Systems	Simplification of structure, realistic goal-setting, and radical transparency regarding company performance metrics.	Netflix	Reduce the space for bullshit by increasing transparency and raising performance standards.	Incentive misalignment where rewards flow to appearance over accuracy.
Recalibrating the Psychological Contract	Shifting from a 'know-it-all' to a 'learn-it-all' culture and celebrating changing one's mind based on evidence.	Microsoft	Position the organization as a learning system where not-knowing is acceptable.	Traditional expectations of leadership omniscience and overconfidence.
Distributing Leadership and Accountability for Truth	Non-hierarchical 'lattice' structures and peer evaluation of contributions.	Gore & Associates	Create multiple nodes of accountability to make it difficult for bullshit to gain traction.	Concentration of authority and information asymmetries in bureaucracies.
Anchoring Identity in Purpose and Authentic Belonging	Embedding values-driven models (1-1-1 model) and connecting personal values to organizational mission.	Salesforce	Provide intrinsic reasons to maintain integrity and authentic communication.	Hollow corporate slogans and a lack of genuine organizational meaning.

Organizations that recognize bullshit as a threat to performance and wellbeing can implement multiple interventions. The following approaches draw on research in organizational communication, evidence-based management, leadership development, and organizational culture. Each includes a real-world organizational example demonstrating its application.

Establishing Transparent, Evidence-Grounded Communication Norms

The OBPS factor "regard for truth" captures the extent to which organizations expect and reward evidence-based communication versus tolerating statements made without factual grounding (Ferreira et al., 2022). Organizations can shift this dimension by establishing explicit norms that value precision, acknowledge uncertainty, and demand evidence. Pfeffer and Sutton's (2006) work on evidence-based management demonstrates that organizations can build cultures where decisions and assertions are routinely backed by data, research, and systematic analysis.

Effective approaches:

• Structured decision protocols: Implement frameworks (e.g., "Five Whys," decision quality criteria) that require evidence and logic to be articulated explicitly before major decisions

• Showing your work: Establish norms that important claims—whether in meetings, presentations, or documents—should be accompanied by supporting evidence or an explicit acknowledgment of uncertainty

• Red team exercises: Create formal processes for challenging proposals, where designated individuals or teams systematically probe assumptions and evidence

• Post-decision reviews: Regularly examine major decisions to compare predictions with outcomes, creating accountability for accuracy

• Accessible data infrastructure: Ensure relevant data and information are readily available to decision-makers, reducing the need to rely on unsupported assertions

• Normalize "I don't know": Leaders modeling intellectual humility by acknowledging uncertainty or gaps in knowledge can reduce pressure on others to bullshit when they lack information

Bridgewater Associates (investment management) has built its culture around "radical transparency" and rigorous truth-seeking. Founder Ray Dalio established principles that require employees to support assertions with evidence and logic, challenge ideas they disagree with (regardless of hierarchy), and engage in "thoughtful disagreement" to surface the best thinking. Meetings are recorded, decisions are scrutinized in post-mortems, and "believability-weighted decision making" gives more weight to people who have demonstrated track records of accuracy on specific topics. While Bridgewater's approach is extreme and may not fit all contexts, it demonstrates that organizations can systematically build cultures inhospitable to bullshit by making evidence and accuracy central to how work gets done.

Implementing Procedural Justice and Speaking-Up Mechanisms

Bullshit thrives when it cannot be safely challenged. Organizational justice research shows that procedural justice—fair processes for decision-making and dispute resolution—increases trust, engagement, and willingness to speak up (Colquitt et al., 2001). Psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation, is essential for voice and learning (Edmondson, 1999). Organizations that create legitimate channels for challenging bullshit and protect those who do so can reduce its prevalence and impact.

Effective approaches:

• Anonymous reporting channels: Hotlines or platforms where employees can flag instances of suspected bullshit without identifying themselves

• Designated ombudsperson: Neutral party to whom employees can raise concerns about misleading communication or pressure to misrepresent information

• Protected dissent roles: Formally empowering certain individuals (e.g., a "chief skeptic" or "devil's advocate") to challenge prevailing narratives

• Regular pulse surveys: Gathering data on employee perceptions of communication quality, leadership honesty, and psychological safety, with action planning based on results

• Transparent escalation processes: Clear pathways for raising concerns that reach senior leadership or the board when necessary

• Non-retaliation policies: Strong, enforced protections for those who call out bullshit, with visible consequences for leaders who punish truth-tellers

NASA, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters (which were partly attributed to suppressed dissent), implemented processes to ensure that safety concerns could be raised regardless of hierarchy. The organization established independent safety panels, required rigorous technical reviews with documented dissents, and created channels for engineers to escalate concerns outside their management chain. In the healthcare industry, Cleveland Clinic has implemented "Speak Up" programs that encourage any staff member—from physicians to housekeeping—to stop procedures or raise concerns about patient safety without fear of retaliation. These mechanisms, while initially focused on safety, demonstrate how organizations can systematically reduce the penalties for challenging prevailing narratives, which can reduce bullshit by increasing the likelihood it will be called out.

Building Critical Thinking and Bullshit-Detection Capabilities

Research on "bullshit receptivity" finds that individuals vary in their ability to detect bullshit, with analytic thinking, critical reasoning, and domain knowledge improving detection (Pennycook et al., 2015; Pennycook & Rand, 2020). Organizations can invest in developing these capabilities among employees, reducing the effectiveness of bullshit and increasing its costs. Media literacy and misinformation research also provides insights into how people can be trained to evaluate information sources and claims more critically (Bergstrom & West, 2020).

Effective approaches:

• Critical thinking training: Workshops on logical reasoning, cognitive biases, and how to evaluate evidence quality

• "Calling bullshit" curricula: Explicit training on recognizing common forms of organizational bullshit, drawing on frameworks like those developed by Bergstrom and West (2020)

• Statistical and data literacy: Ensuring managers can interpret data presentations, understand statistical concepts like correlation versus causation, and recognize misleading visualizations

• Domain expertise development: Deepening technical knowledge in relevant areas so employees can better evaluate claims in their domains

• Cross-functional exposure: Rotation programs or project teams that expose employees to multiple functions, reducing information asymmetries that bullshitters exploit

• Debate and argumentation skills: Training in constructing and evaluating arguments, which can help employees both detect weak reasoning and avoid producing it themselves

McKinsey & Company (management consulting) invests heavily in developing analytical and critical thinking capabilities among its consultants. Training includes rigorous problem-structuring methodologies (e.g., the "MECE" framework—mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive), hypothesis-driven analysis, and techniques for pressure-testing recommendations. Consultants are expected to ground conclusions in data and logic, and peers and partners routinely challenge presentations. While consulting work can sometimes involve its own forms of bullshit, the firm's emphasis on analytical rigor demonstrates how capability-building can reduce unsubstantiated claims. Similarly, the U.S. intelligence community trains analysts in structured analytic techniques (SATs) designed to reduce cognitive bias and improve the quality of intelligence assessments. These techniques—including "analysis of competing hypotheses" and "red team" approaches—provide frameworks for rigorously evaluating evidence and avoiding the temptation to fit assessments to preferred narratives.

Redesigning Operating Models and Control Systems

Organizational bullshit often reflects rational responses to misaligned incentives. When promotion depends on appearing confident and knowledgeable, individuals will bullshit to meet those expectations. When performance metrics can be gamed or manipulated, bullshit in reporting will increase. Organizational design research suggests that structures, processes, and control systems shape behavior powerfully (Simons, 1995). Redesigning these elements can reduce incentives to bullshit and increase costs of doing so.

Effective approaches:

• Redesign performance metrics: Move away from easily manipulated metrics toward more holistic, outcome-based measures; incorporate "how" (process quality) alongside "what" (results)

• Longer evaluation timeframes: Reduce pressure for short-term results that can be achieved through bullshit, extending evaluation periods to allow reality to catch up with claims

• 360-degree feedback: Incorporate peer and subordinate perspectives on leader integrity and communication quality, not just upward-facing impressions

• Separate forecasting from evaluation: Decouple predictions from performance assessment to reduce incentives to make unrealistic promises or inflate projections

• Process audits and verification: Implement systems that routinely verify key assertions, such as sampling customer feedback to validate claimed satisfaction scores or conducting spot-checks of project status reports

• Flatter hierarchies: Reduce layers that create information asymmetry and distance from operational realities, making it harder for bullshit to persist undetected

General Electric under CEO Larry Culp (2018-present) has worked to address cultural issues that some observers linked to overly aggressive targets and pressure to "make the numbers." Culp has emphasized simplification of GE's structure, more realistic goal-setting, and focusing on operational fundamentals rather than financial engineering. This represents a shift toward operating models less dependent on bullshit. In the technology sector, Netflix is known for its "Freedom and Responsibility" culture that includes radical transparency about company performance (including sharing detailed internal metrics with all employees) and hiring only high-performing adults. The company explicitly rejects bureaucratic processes and "brilliant jerks." While Netflix's approach is demanding, it demonstrates how culture and operating model choices can reduce the space for bullshit by increasing transparency, raising performance standards, and trusting employees with information typically held closely.

Providing Financial Resilience and Support Programs

Some bullshit may stem from anxiety and insecurity—individuals may bullshit when they feel financially precarious or fear losing their positions if they admit uncertainty or ignorance. Providing employees with greater financial security and support can reduce these pressures. Research on job security and its effects on wellbeing and performance suggests that greater security supports psychological safety and risk-taking (Jiang & Probst, 2019).

Effective approaches:

• Transparent compensation: Clear, fair pay structures reduce anxiety about relative position and the need to self-promote aggressively

• Employment security commitments: Where feasible, policies that reduce fear of layoffs (e.g., redeployment before termination) can reduce defensive bullshitting

• Financial wellness programs: Education and resources to help employees manage personal finances, reducing financial stress

• Generous severance and transition support: Knowing that even an exit will be managed fairly can reduce the desperation that fuels some bullshit

• Internal mobility programs: Creating pathways to change roles when current positions are poor fits, rather than forcing employees to bullshit their way through unsuitable work

• Mental health and wellbeing resources: Access to counseling, stress management, and other support that addresses the psychological toll of navigating bullshit-heavy environments

Patagonia (outdoor apparel) provides a distinctive example of how employee-centered policies can support integrity. The company offers on-site childcare, flexible work arrangements, generous benefits, and pays employees to participate in environmental activism. Patagonia's commitment to employee wellbeing and its explicit values around environmental and social responsibility create a culture where people feel secure enough to prioritize doing what's right—including calling out bullshit—over simply protecting their positions. While Patagonia is privately held and may have unique flexibility, its example illustrates how supporting employee security and wellbeing can contribute to more honest organizational cultures. In a different sector, Southwest Airlines famously avoided layoffs during industry downturns (unlike most competitors), instead asking employees to accept temporary pay cuts or reduced hours. This commitment to employment security has contributed to the high-trust, high-engagement culture for which Southwest is known, demonstrating that security can foster the psychological safety needed to maintain honest communication under pressure.

Building Long-Term Organizational Resilience Against Bullshit

Tactical interventions are necessary but insufficient. Organizations seeking to build enduring resistance to bullshit must develop deeper capabilities and structural features that make honesty, evidence, and truth-seeking self-reinforcing. The following pillars represent long-term investments in organizational character.

Recalibrating the Psychological Contract: From Omniscience to Learning

Traditional psychological contracts in many organizations implicitly expect leaders and experts to have answers, to appear confident, and to rarely admit uncertainty. This creates pressure to bullshit when actual knowledge is incomplete. A more sustainable contract positions the organization as a learning system where not-knowing is acceptable, curiosity is valued, and changing one's mind in response to evidence is celebrated rather than seen as weakness.

Concrete practices to support this shift include: leaders regularly sharing what they are learning and how their thinking is evolving; creating "learning from failure" forums where mistakes are analyzed constructively; incorporating "lessons learned" into project post-mortems with equal weight given to successes and failures; hiring and promoting for intellectual humility and curiosity rather than just confidence; and measuring and rewarding learning velocity (how quickly individuals and teams update their understanding) alongside execution metrics.

IDEO (design and innovation consulting) has built a culture explicitly centered on prototyping, experimentation, and iterative learning. "Fail early and often" is a celebrated principle, and design reviews routinely involve constructive critique. This culture makes it safer to say "I don't know, let's find out" rather than bullshitting. Similarly, Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella (2014-present) has emphasized shifting from a "know-it-all" to a "learn-it-all" culture, explicitly encouraging growth mindsets and repositioning the company as continuously learning rather than having all the answers. These examples show that leadership tone and deliberate culture-shaping can recalibrate expectations around certainty and learning.

Distributing Leadership and Accountability for Truth

When truth-telling responsibility is concentrated narrowly (e.g., only senior leaders, only designated compliance functions), bullshit can proliferate in the gaps. Distributing both leadership authority and accountability for communication quality throughout the organization creates more checks against bullshit and more local ownership of honesty.

Concrete practices include: empowering teams with real decision authority (and the information access to support it), reducing the need to bullshit upward to gain approval; implementing distributed accountability systems where peers review and validate each other's work; rotating leadership roles so more people experience the visibility and scrutiny that comes with leadership; creating cross-functional councils or working groups that bring diverse perspectives to important decisions; and establishing "horizontal accountability" mechanisms where colleagues at similar levels hold each other to standards, not just top-down oversight.

Gore & Associates (advanced materials and products, known for Gore-Tex) operates with a famously non-hierarchical "lattice" structure where leaders emerge based on followership rather than appointment, teams are small and self-organizing, and peers evaluate each other's contributions. This distributed model creates multiple nodes of accountability and makes it difficult for bullshit to gain traction because peers are empowered to challenge it. In a different industry, Haier (appliances and electronics, China) has radically decentralized into thousands of small, autonomous "microenterprises" that operate as internal startups with direct accountability to customers and markets. This structure eliminates many layers where bullshit could accumulate and makes performance transparent. While these examples are dramatic, they illustrate that distributing power and accountability can reduce both the opportunity and incentive for bullshit.

Anchoring Identity in Purpose and Authentic Belonging

Organizations with weak or hollow purpose may inadvertently encourage bullshit as employees and leaders grasp for meaning and legitimacy through language rather than substance. Conversely, organizations with genuine, shared purpose and authentic cultures of belonging give people intrinsic reasons to maintain integrity—bullshitting would violate their sense of what the organization stands for and their place in it.

Concrete practices include: investing deeply in articulating and living a genuine organizational purpose beyond shareholder returns; selecting and developing leaders who embody purpose authentically rather than those who merely espouse it rhetorically; creating forums for employees to connect their personal values and aspirations to organizational mission; celebrating stories and behaviors that exemplify purpose-driven integrity; and ensuring that performance management, resource allocation, and other systems reinforce rather than contradict stated purpose.

Novo Nordisk (pharmaceuticals, Denmark) has anchored its identity in "changing diabetes" and improving patient outcomes, with this purpose permeating strategy, R&D priorities, and market access programs. Employees describe feeling a deep connection to the mission, which supports high engagement and integrity standards. Salesforce (cloud software) has embedded its "Ohana" (Hawaiian for family) culture and 1-1-1 model (dedicating 1% of equity, product, and employee time to charitable purposes) into its identity from founding. This values-driven identity has helped the company maintain culture through rapid growth. While purpose can certainly be abused or become its own form of bullshit (Spicer, 2020), when genuine it can provide a powerful compass that guides communication toward authenticity and integrity.

Institutionalizing Continuous Learning and Epistemological Humility

Beyond individual learning mindsets, organizations can build systemic capabilities for updating beliefs, challenging assumptions, and improving how they know what they know. This involves treating organizational knowledge as provisional and actively seeking disconfirming evidence rather than only confirming data.

Concrete practices include: establishing "chief skeptic" or "red team" functions with explicit mandates to challenge prevailing views; conducting pre-mortem exercises (imagining a decision has failed and working backward to explain why) before major commitments; implementing "adversarial collaboration" models where those with different views must work together to design tests that could adjudicate between them; creating "idea meritocracy" systems that track whose predictions and judgments prove accurate over time (as at Bridgewater Associates, mentioned earlier); investing in organizational learning capabilities such as knowledge management systems, communities of practice, and systematic post-project reviews; and fostering cultures where changing one's position in light of new evidence is seen as strength, not weakness.

Amazon institutionalizes learning through mechanisms like the "six-page narrative memo" (replacing PowerPoint) that requires rigorous thinking and writing, the practice of starting meetings with silent reading of these memos (forcing actual engagement with content), and the "disagree and commit" principle that allows decisions to move forward even when consensus is lacking, with the understanding that the decision can be revisited if evidence warrants. These practices reflect an organizational commitment to better thinking and learning. Intelligence agencies and military organizations often conduct "red team" exercises and "intelligence preparation of the battlefield" analyses that explicitly seek to avoid confirmation bias and wishful thinking—practices that could be adapted to business contexts.

Conclusion

Organizational bullshit—communication with no regard for truth—represents a pervasive but under-addressed challenge to organizational performance, employee wellbeing, and the broader integrity of our workplaces. As this article has synthesized, bullshit manifests through disregard for evidence and truth in organizational culture, through leadership communication practices, and through the use of obfuscating language. Its consequences include degraded decision quality, reduced trust, lower job satisfaction, and the suppression of the diverse perspectives and dissenting voices that organizations need to learn and adapt.

Yet the picture is not simply one of inevitable decline. Organizations have multiple evidence-based levers available to confront and reduce bullshit: they can establish transparent communication norms that demand evidence and acknowledge uncertainty; implement procedural justice mechanisms that make it safe to challenge bullshit; build critical-thinking capabilities that improve bullshit detection; redesign operating models to reduce incentives for bullshitting and increase costs of doing so; and provide financial and psychological support that reduces the anxiety that can fuel defensive bullshitting.

More fundamentally, organizations can build long-term resilience by recalibrating psychological contracts to value learning over omniscience, distributing leadership authority and accountability for truth-telling, anchoring identity in authentic purpose and belonging, and institutionalizing epistemological humility through systems and practices that continuously test and update organizational knowledge.

Key takeaways for practitioners:

1. Recognize and diagnose: Use frameworks like the OBPS to systematically assess the prevalence and forms of bullshit in your organization—where does disregard for evidence show up? How is leadership communication perceived? Is language clarifying or obfuscating?

2. Address root causes, not just symptoms: Look beyond individual bad actors to understand the incentives, pressures, and structural features that make bullshit rational or necessary from an individual's perspective, then redesign those features.

3. Make truth-telling safe and valued: Psychological safety and procedural justice are foundational—if people cannot safely challenge bullshit or admit uncertainty, interventions will fail.

4. Model from the top: Leaders must demonstrate the behaviors they wish to see—intellectual humility, evidence-based reasoning, plain language, and intolerance for bullshit—because hierarchical organizations take cues from authority figures.

5. Invest for the long term: Quick fixes will not solve a culture of bullshit; building integrity requires sustained commitment to capabilities, systems, and culture.

The organizations that successfully reduce bullshit will likely realize significant advantages: better decisions, more engaged employees, stronger external reputations, and cultures more conducive to innovation and adaptation. Those that allow bullshit to metastasize risk not only inefficiency and disengagement but, in extreme cases, catastrophic failures when reality can no longer be ignored.

"This place is full of it" should not be an accepted refrain. With awareness, will, and systematic effort, leaders can build organizations where truth, evidence, and authentic communication are not quaint ideals but daily practices—workplaces where fewer employees mutter in frustration, and more can engage meaningfully in work that matters.

Research Infographic

Ending Organizational Bullshit Slide Deck

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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Research Officer (Nexus Institute for Work and AI); Associate Dean and Director of HR Academic Programs (WGU); Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD/HR/Leadership Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

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Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2026). The Hidden Tax: How Organizational Bullshit Undermines Performance, Wellbeing, and Trust. Human Capital Leadership Review, 31(1). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.31.1.5