![]() ![]() “If you have employees at Google and you want to motivate them, you could try to trash-talking Amazon or Apple, and that may promote some of the beneficial effects,” says Yip. While one of his studies found that trash talk can make people more motivated in competitive situations, it also showed that people won’t put as much effort into a group project if their colleagues are being uncivil.Īnecdotally at least, most people seem to know this rule intuitively already, since it’s much more common to find trash talk between “tribes” of people, such as companies, football teams and university colleges, than it is among individuals. “I would say generally there are more negative consequences to trash talk among employees, because there’s a cooperative element to the workplace, where people are interdependent and need to work together on projects,” he says. Yip suggests avoiding trash talk among your fellow colleagues altogether – and instead using it to generate a rivalry between your organisation and an outside organisation. McDermott also stresses the importance of keeping it playful, and generating a rapport with the person you’d like to begin a verbal battle with beforehand throwing around insults at random certainly isn’t going to make you any friends, and it might even get you fired. To avoid descending down the slippery slope from trash talker into bully, those considering introducing some competitive repartee to their day would be better off talking themselves up, rather than talking others down. “Of course, I didn’t want to really offend people, just to get a reaction out of them.” “A lot of it actually involves quite a lot of misogyny and homophobia – it revolves around emasculating people or telling them that they play like a girl,” she explains. However, McDermott cautions that she had to choose the trash talk in her study extremely carefully. “I think the element of distraction would be less though, because you’d be trash talked and then go back to your desk and think about it.” Instead, she speculates that the emotional effects of being talked down would linger in people who had been trash talked, and possibly affect their motivation, for better or for worse. “I think to a certain extent these effects would stand up in the workplace,” she says. However, McDermott is confident that her study provides some clues. Trash talk is a surprisingly understudied phenomenon, considering its ubiquity, and no one has investigated its effects on workers in an office environment yet. ![]() So would this – arguably highly unethical – practice also work in the office? And if so, how could it be deployed most effectively? Naturally this delighted Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of their rival, Virgin Atlantic, and he arranged for a blimp to fly over the half-finished attraction with a banner that read “BA can’t get it up!” Alas, in the final stages, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be ready on time. This included the construction of a giant Ferris wheel, the now-iconic “London Eye”, which was sponsored by British Airways. Yip’s favourite example of the latter occurred in 1999, when London was preparing to celebrate the new millennium. “It’s shocking really.” So how is all this gutter talk affecting people? And should we all be honing our best put-downs?īut first – what actually is trash talk? The researchers defined it as “boastful remarks about the self or insulting remarks about an opponent”. “It’s quite prevalent and quite frequent,” he says. They surveyed 143 people about their experiences, and found that 61% could remember instances of trash talk that had occurred within the last three months. Last year Jeremy Yip, an expert in management from Georgetown University, along with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, decided to find out exactly how prevalent trash talk is among the employees of Fortune 500 companies. The latest evidence suggests that these verbal contests have been creeping into the workplace – and they’re far more prevalent than you would expect. And though it might be hard to imagine a colleague laughing that their pot plant could give a better presentation than you, it turns out that, in fact, this kind of office chat is relatively normal. ![]()
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