We Give a Shit: A Commentary on the Psychometric Properties of the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale

Abstract

Organizational bullshit refers to workplace communication with no regard for the truth. An important step toward the empirical study of this ubiquitous phenomenon was the development and validation of the organizational bullshit perception scale (OBPS; Ferreira et al., 2022). In two studies with 1,666 and 709 employees in Germany, we employed the OBPS to examine associations between perceived organizational bullshit and employee wellbeing. The standard preliminary analyses to evaluate psychometric properties of the measures used in these studies indicated some issues with our German version of the OBPS, including poor fit of measurement models and relatively low reliability estimates. Based on these findings, we conducted additional analyses of the factorial structure of the OBPS and a separate validation study using the original English version of the scale ( n = 214 employees). In this commentary, we draw on results from these analyses and previous validation studies of the OBPS to discuss potential issues related to the measurement of organizational bullshit, including problems associated with reverse-coded items and possible conceptual overlap among items and dimensions, and we identify areas for theoretical advancements of the construct itself. We offer several suggestions for the further refinement of theoretical conceptualization and measurement of organizational bullshit.