Abstract
Kiazad et al.’s (2025) typology, while valuable, risks misattributing to individual strategy what is fundamentally organisational pathology. This commentary argues that workplace bullshitting represents a strategic adaptation to structurally produced psychological unsafety rather than individual moral failure. Three implications follow: interventions must target organisational conditions rather than individual honesty; power asymmetries determine whose bullshitting faces consequences through what I term malperformative inclusion—where organisations rhetorically embrace authentic communication while structurally punishing it from marginalised employees; and the construct’s cultural boundaries require explicit testing before claims of universality.
Psychological Unsafety as Root Cause
Three of Kiazad et al.’s four quadrants—getting ahead, getting away, and getting around—reflect environments where honest communication carries unacceptable professional risk. Edmondson’s (1999) concept of psychological safety provides the explanatory mechanism: when employees perceive that admitting uncertainty, acknowledging mistakes, or raising concerns threatens their standing, truth-indifferent communication becomes adaptive. The fourth quadrant—getting along—complicates this picture somewhat, as communion-promotion bullshitting that builds relationships may represent functional social coordination rather than pathology. Distinguishing adaptive social lubrication from compensatory bullshitting-as-survival becomes precisely the diagnostic challenge for researchers and practitioners.
This reframing shifts intervention design fundamentally. Rather than training individual honesty, organisations must redesign structures that make authenticity professionally risky. Two specific changes warrant implementation: First, error-reporting system redesign that separates learning reviews from performance evaluation, measured through increased near-miss reporting rates and decreased time-to-disclosure for problems. Second, reward system modification that explicitly recognises intellectual humility—operationalised as acknowledging uncertainty, seeking input, and revising positions—in promotion criteria and performance metrics, assessed through 360-degree feedback items targeting these behaviours. Organisations that focus on individual behaviour modification while ignoring structural causes are not merely ineffective but potentially complicit in the conditions that produce bullshitting.
Power Asymmetries and Malperformative Inclusion
Kiazad et al. treat bullshitting as universally adaptive, but this obscures critical questions about whose truth-indifferent communication faces consequences. Research on workplace inequality demonstrates that identical behaviours receive differential interpretation based on employee identity (Acker, 2006). Women engaging in self-promotional bullshitting often face backlash for violating gender expectations, while men performing identical behaviours are rewarded for confidence (Rudman & Glick, 2001). I propose the concept of malperformative inclusion to explain this mechanism: organisations may rhetorically embrace psychological safety, authenticity, and voice while structurally punishing honest communication from marginalised employees. This creates conditions where those employees must bullshit to survive—then face harsher consequences when detected.
Proposition
Tolerance for workplace bullshitting varies systematically by employee social identity and organisational position. Specifically: (a) women’s confident assertions face greater scrutiny than men’s identical statements; (b) racial minorities receive harsher penalties for defensive bullshitting interpreted as resistance to authority; and (c) these asymmetries intensify in high-stakes decisions, public forums, and written communication where accountability trails exist. Employment precarity likely amplifies these dynamics—contract workers cannot afford to appear uncertain yet face harsher consequences when bullshitting is detected.
Practical Implication
Leaders should implement credibility-judgment audits—systematic reviews of which employees’ uncertain statements are questioned, whose confident assertions are accepted without challenge, and whose communications trigger accountability demands. Such audits can reveal whether bullshitting functions as stratified privilege, enabling targeted intervention in evaluation processes.
Cultural Boundary Conditions
The construct assumes Western epistemological foundations regarding individual truth-telling and direct communication that may not translate across cultural contexts. Many collectivist cultures prioritise relational harmony and indirect communication that could be misclassified as bullshitting (Triandis, 1995). In high-context Japanese organisational communication, for example, tatemae (public stance) and honne (true feelings) represent culturally sanctioned distinctions between surface communication and private views. Applying Kiazad et al.’s framework without cultural calibration risks misclassifying tatemae as deceptive bullshitting rather than appropriate social coordination. This is not merely an academic concern—multinational organisations applying Western-developed frameworks risk pathologising culturally appropriate communication in their global subsidiaries.
Misclassification Test
Researchers should examine whether communication identified as ‘bullshitting’ serves recognised social-coordination functions within that cultural context, whether speakers and hearers share understanding of the communication’s indirect nature, and whether such communication maintains rather than undermines relational trust. Communication meeting these criteria likely represents culturally appropriate indirectness rather than truth-indifference.
Methodological Recursion
Kiazad et al.’s self-report methodology faces a recursive challenge: participants may bullshit about their own bullshitting. This recursive problem is not merely methodological but reveals something theoretically significant. Workplace bullshitting is about impression management, so studying it through self-report necessarily implicates the phenomenon itself. Strategic incentives to manage impressions with researchers could systematically confound findings about strategic impression management. This suggests that truth-indifferent communication may be more pervasive than self-report methods can capture—which strengthens rather than undermines the argument that bullshitting is structurally produced rather than individually chosen.
Feasible Alternative Design
Brief ethnographic shadowing combined with discourse sampling could address this limitation. Researchers would observe participants across several work interactions, audio-record naturally occurring communications, and conduct stimulated-recall interviews where participants explain their communication choices while reviewing recordings. This approach captures naturalistic behaviour while generating insight into participant motivations without relying solely on retrospective self-report vulnerable to the very phenomenon under investigation.
Conclusion
Kiazad et al.’s typology advances understanding of workplace bullshitting, but realising its potential requires recognising that employees engage in truth-indifferent communication when organisational structures make authenticity risky. The framework’s treatment of bullshitting as individual adaptation obscures how organisations systematically produce the conditions requiring such communication—and how power asymmetries determine whose bullshitting is tolerated versus punished. Interventions targeting individual behaviour modification miss this structural etiology. Organisations serious about fostering authentic communication must examine whether their systems create conditions where bullshitting becomes necessary for survival, attend to whose bullshitting they tolerate, and confront the possibility that their espoused commitment to psychological safety may itself be a form of organisational bullshitting.
