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athletes do it CEOs do it people in the office and home do it what I'm talking
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about is trash-talking but how does it affect the people who are actually its targets here to talk about the issue are
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Wharton professor are Maurice Schweitzer and Wharton lecturer and research scholar Jeremy Yip welcome both of them
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have written a co-written a paper a research paper on this very issue and they're here to give us more details so
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tell us about the premise of your paper the premise of our paper is to provide were the first to provide an initial
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conceptualization of trash-talking and some empirical evidence of the interpersonal effects of trash-talking
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on competitive behavior so we often think about trash-talking in the forum of sports and politics but it features
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quite prominently in organizational life I'll give you an example that illustrates trash-talking in
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organizational life so you may be familiar with the London Eye to celebrate the new millennium the City of
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London constructed the London Eye a giant Ferris wheel that sits on the shore of the River Thames and while you
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may be familiar with the London Eye which might not know is that they had British Airways sponsored the
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construction in the final stages of construction as they erected the London Eye into place they encountered some
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technical difficulties Richard Branson the CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airways decided to capitalize on the misfortune
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of one of its key competitors and broadcasted a message intended to humiliate British Airways or be a he had
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Virgin Atlantic arranged a blimp to fly over the construction site of the London
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Eye with a giant banner that read be a can't get it up this public insult intensified a long-standing competition
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between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic and it's this style of aggressive communication in competition
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that we explore in our paper and that we'll discuss with you today so how would you define trash-talking
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we conceptualize trash-talking as competitive in civility that is uncivil remarks or aggressive communication that
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is expressed between competitors more specifically we define trash-talking as boastful comments about
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the self or insulting remarks about competitors that are delivered by a competitor typically before or during a
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competition what's interesting is that trash-talking also pervades corporate in
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America so I'll give you a couple of examples of CEOs trash-talking one example is from Dan Akerson who was the
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CEO of GM so when a christen was CEO of GM he announced that GM would be competing directly with the Mercedes
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c-class they were going to launch a car a rear-wheel drive car that would compete directly with the Mercedes
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c-class and when asked what he thought about Mercedes he said they call it c-class because it's very average John
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Legere is another example of a CEO who at t-mobile who ripped into one of his competitors AT&T when he said I see more
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honesty in a match.com ad than a tMT's coverage maps so these are just a couple
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of examples of CEOs engaging in trash-talking but we've also but the question came up how prevalent is
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trash-talking in the workplace and so to initiate our study we conducted a pilot
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study in which we recruited full-time office workers at fortune 500 companies and we asked them to recall an incident
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where they heard or said and a boastful or insulting remark at work while competing for resources or recognition
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what we found was that we received a variety of different incidences that they recalled but most interestingly we
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found that 57% of the employees indicated that trash-talking occurs on a monthly or more often than monthly
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that's a very surprising statistic so professor Schweitzer can you talk more
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about your pilot study and the six experiments that went into it sure so this this topic is really
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pervasive we see trash talking around us and what we set out to do is to look at
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the consequences of trash talking and in particular what happens to the person who is receiving this trash talking in
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another pilot story that we ran we found that people don't anticipate trash talking having a motivational effect but
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in fact very consistently in our studies we find that targets of trash talking become very motivated and on effort
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based tasks and we have people doing some pretty mundane things whether it's
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counting letters or moving sliders when people have to exert effort for something within a competition if
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somebody engaged in trash talking so you're a loser that dollars mine I'm
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going to beat you like a rented mule when people are the targets of these kind of messages what we find is that
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they become much more motivated they increase their effort and the performance goes up so so one one key
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finding of our work is that targets attract shocking become very motivated now we ran some other studies to show
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that sometimes to become even so motivated they're likely to gauge in unethical behavior to win so people care
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about is outperforming this person who's trash-talking them and they're willing
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to both expend constructive effort but also engage in unethical behavior to make sure they outperform their
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competitor so are there some constructive effects of or destructive effects of trash-talking well there are
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so in addition to these constructive effects when we wanted a creative task we found the trash Hawking is actually
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disruptive so it motivates us but it's also distracting and targets of trash-talking were less
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successful completing a creative task then were people who weren't targets of
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trash-talking so so that is trash-talking can be motivating to the targets but it's also distracting to the
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targets so how can we use your findings and apply them to our personal lives our
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work lives how can we make this practical well our work informs a number of practical implications I think first
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trash-talking is we can provide a prescriptive advice for potential and habitual trash talkers trash Chargers
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need to recognize that they may unintentionally be boosting their opponents motivation and performance so
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we encourage trash talkers to engage in deeper perspective-taking so that they are able to gauge what the
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interpersonal consequences are for the route behavior I think second we encourage managers executives and
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coaches to think carefully about when to expose their employees to trash talking
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we urge managers to deliberately and strategically expose trash talking to employees once they've considered what
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tasks that their employees are performing so in light of our findings when employees are working on routine
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tasks that require effort exposing them to a trash talking message that was said
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or broadcasted from their competitor may actually boost their performance but if
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that performance task is is more cognitively demanding and involves creativity then we would find that trash
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talking may actually diminish their performance and so managers need to be aware of the different effects on
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behavior that trash talking can have so what does trash talking do in cooperative settings well what's
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interesting is that trash line can be very destructive in a cooperative setting whereas it's motivating in a
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competitive setting in one of our studies we had people either cooperate with somebody or
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compete with somebody and these were Confederates paid research assistants who engaged in the same trash-talking
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behavior in both cases so they said things like I can't believe unpaired with you I can tell you're such a loser
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already and then they either performed a cooperative task or competitive task the
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exact same messages boosted performance in a competitive task but harm performance in a cooperative task so
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what contribution does your body of work add to existing academic theory in this
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in this in this area well our work I think connects to two important literature's one is the literature on
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competition and rivalry more specifically so Jeremy talked about British Airways and virgin and here
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trash-talking is part of that rivalry and competitive environment and we see trash-talking motivate people but also
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exacerbate exacerbate conflict we see rivalry as something that typically occurs over a long period of time with
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competed interactions but trash-talking is a way to fast-track that relationship
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so we can transform you know normal competitive behavior into a much more intense more rivalry like situation with
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trash-talking the second literature that we would connect this to is Lutron incivility and there's some very
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interesting work by christine poor and others looking at uncivil behavior in the workplace and what we do is we find
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that consistent with that prior work its destructive in cooperative settings so within your organization trash-talking
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each other is not very useful but in competitive settings it might have an interesting role to play and in some
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other emerging work that we have we're beginning to find that the trash-talking
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somebody else's group can actually have a bonding effect on our group so how
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will you follow up your research the curve work that we just described focused on the effects of trash talking
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on the target in dyadic interactions and some of the more current work that Maurice and I are carrying out
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investigates the effects of trash talking in group interactions it's valuable to understand the effects of
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trash talking between groups and also to understand the consequences for observers who are not necessarily
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targets in our current work we are investigating how people who are observers react to trash talking and
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whether that facilitates group cohesion and functioning so if we return to the example of Richard Branson which I
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opened with why did Richard Branson go to the trouble of spending all that money and time to have a blimp with the
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giant banner on it and float it over the construction site are there any benefits
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to doing that we hypothesize that employees in that situation may respond quite favorably to it and that they be
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maybe more likely to identify closely to their organization and so we've begun
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collecting data and testing that hypothesis wonderful thank you so much for joining us today thank thank you for
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