00:00:01
athletes do it CEOs do it people in the
00:00:04
office and home do it what I'm talking
00:00:07
about is trash-talking but how does it
00:00:10
affect the people who are actually its
00:00:12
targets here to talk about the issue are
00:00:15
Wharton professor are Maurice Schweitzer
00:00:17
and Wharton lecturer and research
00:00:20
scholar Jeremy Yip welcome both of them
00:00:24
have written a co-written a paper a
00:00:26
research paper on this very issue and
00:00:28
they're here to give us more details so
00:00:32
tell us about the premise of your paper
00:00:34
the premise of our paper is to provide
00:00:38
were the first to provide an initial
00:00:40
conceptualization of trash-talking
00:00:42
and some empirical evidence of the
00:00:44
interpersonal effects of trash-talking
00:00:46
on competitive behavior so we often
00:00:50
think about trash-talking in the forum
00:00:52
of sports and politics but it features
00:00:56
quite prominently in organizational life
00:00:59
I'll give you an example that
00:01:01
illustrates trash-talking in
00:01:03
organizational life so you may be
00:01:06
familiar with the London Eye to
00:01:09
celebrate the new millennium the City of
00:01:11
London constructed the London Eye a
00:01:13
giant Ferris wheel that sits on the
00:01:14
shore of the River Thames and while you
00:01:17
may be familiar with the London Eye
00:01:18
which might not know is that they had
00:01:21
British Airways sponsored the
00:01:24
construction in the final stages of
00:01:27
construction as they erected the London
00:01:29
Eye into place they encountered some
00:01:31
technical difficulties Richard Branson
00:01:34
the CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airways
00:01:36
decided to capitalize on the misfortune
00:01:38
of one of its key competitors and
00:01:40
broadcasted a message intended to
00:01:42
humiliate British Airways or be a he had
00:01:46
Virgin Atlantic arranged a blimp to fly
00:01:48
over the construction site of the London
00:01:50
Eye with a giant banner that read be a
00:01:53
can't get it up this public insult
00:01:56
intensified a long-standing competition
00:01:59
between British Airways and Virgin
00:02:01
Atlantic and it's this style of
00:02:03
aggressive communication in competition
00:02:05
that we explore in our paper and that
00:02:08
we'll discuss with you today so how
00:02:10
would you define trash-talking
00:02:12
we conceptualize trash-talking as
00:02:16
competitive in civility that is uncivil
00:02:20
remarks or aggressive communication that
00:02:23
is expressed between competitors
00:02:26
more specifically we define
00:02:28
trash-talking as boastful comments about
00:02:31
the self or insulting remarks about
00:02:34
competitors that are delivered by a
00:02:37
competitor typically before or during a
00:02:40
competition what's interesting is that
00:02:43
trash-talking also pervades corporate in
00:02:47
America so I'll give you a couple of
00:02:48
examples of CEOs trash-talking one
00:02:52
example is from Dan Akerson who was the
00:02:56
CEO of GM so when a christen was CEO of
00:02:59
GM he announced that GM would be
00:03:02
competing directly with the Mercedes
00:03:05
c-class they were going to launch a car
00:03:07
a rear-wheel drive car that would
00:03:08
compete directly with the Mercedes
00:03:09
c-class and when asked what he thought
00:03:14
about Mercedes he said they call it
00:03:16
c-class because it's very average John
00:03:19
Legere is another example of a CEO who
00:03:23
at t-mobile who ripped into one of his
00:03:26
competitors AT&T when he said I see more
00:03:29
honesty in a match.com ad than a tMT's
00:03:32
coverage maps so these are just a couple
00:03:35
of examples of CEOs engaging in
00:03:37
trash-talking but we've also but the
00:03:40
question came up how prevalent is
00:03:42
trash-talking in the workplace and so to
00:03:45
initiate our study we conducted a pilot
00:03:48
study in which we recruited full-time
00:03:51
office workers at fortune 500 companies
00:03:54
and we asked them to recall an incident
00:03:58
where they heard or said and a boastful
00:04:02
or insulting remark at work while
00:04:06
competing for resources or recognition
00:04:09
what we found was that we received a
00:04:13
variety of different incidences that
00:04:15
they recalled but most interestingly we
00:04:18
found that 57% of the employees
00:04:21
indicated that trash-talking occurs on a
00:04:23
monthly or more often than monthly
00:04:26
that's a very surprising statistic so
00:04:29
professor Schweitzer can you talk more
00:04:31
about your pilot study and the six
00:04:33
experiments that went into it
00:04:35
sure so this this topic is really
00:04:38
pervasive we see trash talking around us
00:04:41
and what we set out to do is to look at
00:04:43
the consequences of trash talking and in
00:04:47
particular what happens to the person
00:04:48
who is receiving this trash talking in
00:04:51
another pilot story that we ran we found
00:04:53
that people don't anticipate trash
00:04:57
talking having a motivational effect but
00:05:01
in fact very consistently in our studies
00:05:03
we find that targets of trash talking
00:05:07
become very motivated and on effort
00:05:11
based tasks and we have people doing
00:05:14
some pretty mundane things whether it's
00:05:15
counting letters or moving sliders when
00:05:18
people have to exert effort for
00:05:20
something within a competition if
00:05:22
somebody engaged in trash talking so
00:05:26
you're a loser that dollars mine I'm
00:05:29
going to beat you like a rented mule
00:05:30
when people are the targets of these
00:05:34
kind of messages what we find is that
00:05:37
they become much more motivated they
00:05:39
increase their effort and the
00:05:40
performance goes up so so one one key
00:05:44
finding of our work is that targets
00:05:47
attract shocking become very motivated
00:05:50
now we ran some other studies to show
00:05:54
that sometimes to become even so
00:05:56
motivated they're likely to gauge in
00:05:59
unethical behavior to win so people care
00:06:03
about is outperforming this person who's
00:06:06
trash-talking them and they're willing
00:06:09
to both expend constructive effort but
00:06:11
also engage in unethical behavior to
00:06:14
make sure they outperform their
00:06:16
competitor so are there some
00:06:19
constructive effects of or destructive
00:06:22
effects of trash-talking well there are
00:06:26
so in addition to these constructive
00:06:28
effects when we wanted a creative task
00:06:31
we found the trash Hawking is actually
00:06:33
disruptive so it motivates us but it's
00:06:37
also distracting
00:06:38
and targets of trash-talking were less
00:06:41
successful completing a creative task
00:06:43
then were people who weren't targets of
00:06:46
trash-talking so so that is
00:06:48
trash-talking can be motivating to the
00:06:52
targets but it's also distracting to the
00:06:54
targets so how can we use your findings
00:06:58
and apply them to our personal lives our
00:07:01
work lives how can we make this
00:07:03
practical well our work informs a number
00:07:07
of practical implications I think first
00:07:10
trash-talking is we can provide a
00:07:13
prescriptive advice for potential and
00:07:15
habitual trash talkers trash Chargers
00:07:19
need to recognize that they may
00:07:20
unintentionally be boosting their
00:07:22
opponents motivation and performance so
00:07:25
we encourage trash talkers to engage in
00:07:28
deeper perspective-taking
00:07:30
so that they are able to gauge what the
00:07:34
interpersonal consequences are for the
00:07:36
route behavior I think second we
00:07:39
encourage managers executives and
00:07:42
coaches to think carefully about when to
00:07:48
expose their employees to trash talking
00:07:51
we urge managers to deliberately and
00:07:55
strategically expose trash talking to
00:07:58
employees once they've considered what
00:08:01
tasks that their employees are
00:08:02
performing so in light of our findings
00:08:05
when employees are working on routine
00:08:07
tasks that require effort exposing them
00:08:10
to a trash talking message that was said
00:08:12
or broadcasted from their competitor may
00:08:15
actually boost their performance but if
00:08:18
that performance task is is more
00:08:21
cognitively demanding and involves
00:08:23
creativity then we would find that trash
00:08:26
talking may actually diminish their
00:08:29
performance and so managers need to be
00:08:32
aware of the different effects on
00:08:34
behavior that trash talking can have so
00:08:37
what does trash talking do in
00:08:39
cooperative settings well what's
00:08:42
interesting is that trash line can be
00:08:44
very destructive in a cooperative
00:08:47
setting whereas it's motivating in a
00:08:50
competitive setting
00:08:52
in one of our studies we had people
00:08:53
either cooperate with somebody or
00:08:56
compete with somebody and these were
00:08:58
Confederates paid research assistants
00:09:00
who engaged in the same trash-talking
00:09:03
behavior in both cases so they said
00:09:06
things like I can't believe unpaired
00:09:08
with you I can tell you're such a loser
00:09:10
already and then they either performed a
00:09:14
cooperative task or competitive task the
00:09:17
exact same messages boosted performance
00:09:21
in a competitive task but harm
00:09:24
performance in a cooperative task so
00:09:27
what contribution does your body of work
00:09:30
add to existing academic theory in this
00:09:35
in this in this area well our work I
00:09:39
think connects to two important
00:09:42
literature's one is the literature on
00:09:44
competition and rivalry
00:09:47
more specifically so Jeremy talked about
00:09:50
British Airways and virgin and here
00:09:53
trash-talking is part of that rivalry
00:09:56
and competitive environment and we see
00:10:00
trash-talking motivate people but also
00:10:03
exacerbate exacerbate conflict we see
00:10:07
rivalry as something that typically
00:10:10
occurs over a long period of time with
00:10:12
competed interactions but trash-talking
00:10:16
is a way to fast-track that relationship
00:10:19
so we can transform you know normal
00:10:21
competitive behavior into a much more
00:10:24
intense more rivalry like situation with
00:10:28
trash-talking the second literature that
00:10:31
we would connect this to is Lutron
00:10:33
incivility and there's some very
00:10:35
interesting work by christine poor and
00:10:37
others looking at uncivil behavior in
00:10:41
the workplace and what we do is we find
00:10:45
that consistent with that prior work its
00:10:47
destructive in cooperative settings so
00:10:51
within your organization trash-talking
00:10:53
each other is not very useful but in
00:10:55
competitive settings it might have an
00:10:57
interesting role to play and in some
00:11:00
other emerging work that we have we're
00:11:02
beginning to find that the trash-talking
00:11:05
somebody else's group can actually have
00:11:07
a bonding effect on our group so how
00:11:11
will you follow up your research the
00:11:14
curve work that we just described
00:11:16
focused on the effects of trash talking
00:11:18
on the target in dyadic interactions and
00:11:21
some of the more current work that
00:11:22
Maurice and I are carrying out
00:11:24
investigates the effects of trash
00:11:26
talking in group interactions it's
00:11:28
valuable to understand the effects of
00:11:30
trash talking between groups and also to
00:11:33
understand the consequences for
00:11:35
observers who are not necessarily
00:11:37
targets in our current work we are
00:11:42
investigating how people who are
00:11:45
observers react to trash talking and
00:11:48
whether that facilitates group cohesion
00:11:52
and functioning so if we return to the
00:11:54
example of Richard Branson which I
00:11:56
opened with why did Richard Branson go
00:12:00
to the trouble of spending all that
00:12:02
money and time to have a blimp with the
00:12:04
giant banner on it and float it over the
00:12:07
construction site are there any benefits
00:12:09
to doing that we hypothesize that
00:12:15
employees in that situation may respond
00:12:18
quite favorably to it and that they be
00:12:20
maybe more likely to identify closely to
00:12:24
their organization and so we've begun
00:12:26
collecting data and testing that
00:12:29
hypothesis wonderful thank you so much
00:12:32
for joining us today thank thank you for
00:12:37
more insight from knowledge at Wharton
00:12:39
please visit knowledge Wharton UPenn edu
00:12:47
you
