Tag Archives: profanity

There’s a &%!$ing Study for Everything

Should leaders cuss?  Believe it or not, someone's done a management study on that question and as you can imagine it sounds like it was one of the more entertaining academic exercises you'll ever find:

In the most memorable scene of any academic paper I've read lately, Jenkins, after working in the packing department for a couple of months, uses nuclear-grade profanities to challenge an alpha-male co-worker, a guy named Ernest: "Well f—–g get on with it then, you lazy —-." Other workers gasped, but in fact, the incident led Jenkins to be invited to join group activities from which he'd previously been excluded. "[Jenkins] had identified the profane linguistic 'initiation rite' for inclusion in the packers' social group, and used it successfully," the authors concluded.