Corporate jargon is eroding decision-making, fuelling disengagement: study

When summer students arrive at ATB Financial each year, they notice something immediately. “’You guys use words here I just don't understand,’” says Tara Lockyer, Chief People, Culture, Brand and Communications Officer at ATB Financial in Calgary, recounting the feedback. It's a small moment, but it points to a larger problem: some organizations have become so fluent in their own internal dialect that they've stopped communicating altogether, says Lockyer. 

Research from Cornell University gives that observation a sharper edge. A 2026 study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences by Cornell cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate “BS” Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-sounding-but-empty organizational rhetoric, developed through four studies involving more than 1,000 workers in the United States and Canada. The findings are striking: employees who scored higher on receptivity to vague corporate language performed significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making than their peers, and those who fell for such language were also more likely to spread it. 

For Canadian HR leaders, the implications are that language used in internal communications can shape how people think, decide, and act. And if there isn’t a direct message in those communications, then organizational culture and effectiveness could suffer. 

“When you're not communicating in a clear and concise manner, you’re less effective in terms of how you're presenting things to people,” says Frederick King, instructor of business and professional communication at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “I think people recognize it too, when they see it, and they're more likely to call it out.” 

The AI amplification problem 

The jargon problem isn't new – “there's just so much that we've internalized working in corporate North America over the years,” says Lockyer – but she points to artificial intelligence (AI) as a new accelerant. “AI picks up on the most commonly used words,” says Lockyer. “There's just corporate-speak that's universal – ‘customer centricity,’ ‘let's take that offline’ – we've internalized this working in corporate North America over the years.” 

King agrees that AI can perpetuate a vague language problem. “If you read an AI document, you can kind of tell because it's usually fairly generic and there's a lot of word salad going on where it sounds like they're saying something important and they're really not saying anything at all.” The concern is that more AI-generated language organizations use, the more that language gets fed back into AI systems, normalizing it further, he adds. 

Lockyer sees both the problem and a potential fix. "Wouldn't it be funny to use AI to catch jargon that AI uses?” she says. It's a sardonic observation, but it points to something practical: using language analysis tools to audit communications for grade level, acronym density, and overused terms before they harden into institutional habit, according to Lockyer. 

When HR is the source of jargon 

There’s an uncomfortable dimension to this for HR leaders and their departments: HR is often the originator of the very jargon it should be dismantling. 

“As an HR practitioner, I understand the differences between skills, capabilities, and competencies,” says Lockyer. “But people not in HR don't know and don't care, so I almost think we're doing it for ourselves and not for the benefit of the employees we serve.” 

King believes that jargon-heavy language in HR may sometimes be intentional and in certain circumstances it’s meant to be distanced from the content of the message. “A lot of organizations use [jargon] to be intentionally obfuscating,” he says. “When talking about outsourcing and downsizing, you're talking about firing people, but we call it downsizing or a shift in a new direction – it's entrenched in our everyday professional language because we want to erase the emotional content from it.” 

That observation connects directly to the Cornell research. The study found that being more receptive to corporate jargon was positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements – meaning the employees most excited by “visionary” corporate language may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions, which researcher Littrell called “a concerning cycle.” 

Plain language standard raises the bar 

The conversation gained new context in October 2025, when Canada published its first national plain language standard. Accessibility Standards Canada announced the CAN-ASC-3.1:2025 Plain Language standard, an equity-based standard designed to help organizations remove communication barriers by ensuring wording, structure, and design are clear enough that audiences can find what they need, understand it, and act on it. 

The standard was created primarily for federally regulated entities, but King sees limited reach into the private sector as a structural challenge. “It's hard to regulate anything in a private organization,” he says. “And ultimately, who's going to decide what constitutes plain language?” 

Lockyer takes a more pragmatic view of what auditing language might actually look like in practice. “If we ran all of our communications through a tool that said what grade level are we communicating at, I would expect somewhere around grade 8 to 10 is what we would target, versus higher academia, where you're going to get into some more sophisticated words that may not be engaging to all folks,” she says. 

Plain, specific language brings clarity 

Both King and Lockyer point to specificity and clarity as the antidote. "As communicators, we need to spend more time getting really specific as opposed to jargony,” says Lockyer. She offers a practical example: ATB Financial has been working through a basic definition question about the word “collaboration” and whether it means sharing ideas, co-creating, or something else. The answer changes everything about how the concept is applied, she says. 

King recommends a technique he calls paraphrase practice. "When you're faced with a jargony statement that doesn't make entire sense to you, spend the time to analyze and paraphrase it,” he says. “What do you think they actually mean? Can you put it into your own words? And if you can't, then there's a good chance that there's not a whole lot of substance there to engage with.” 

Lockyer points to when her organization revised its vision and values, the senior leadership team wanted them to be more aspirational and sweeping. “We pulled them back to say, ‘That might feel so unattainable and disengaging if we push it that far,’ because people are like, that's just not who we are,” she says. “When you talk about the culture that you're transforming because you want to better enable the strategy, you need to talk about where we're at and what it looks like, not necessarily say, ‘this is who we are’ yet. 

For King mission and values statements are only effective if they actually refer to specific things that people can take action on and accomplish. “But HR can only do that if the direction they're getting from the C-suite is aligned with it as well,” she says. 

Challenging vague language 

For HR leaders looking to change the culture of communication in their organizations, King emphasizes psychological safety as a precondition. “It's up to individuals to challenge it,” he says. “But the challenge there is: is it safe to do so? Do you feel safe in your organization to say something?” 

Building environments where employees feel empowered to ask what something actually means, without risk, isn’t just a cultural aspiration. It’s a decision-making imperative, according to the Cornell research. 

Empty language is a leadership failure before it becomes a communication failure, according to King. “If all of this rhetoric that’s being thrown around is really empty, if it doesn't have actual meaning, if you're just saying things to sound smart, then what’s the organization doing?” he says. “That's when employees stop buying it and when loyalty to the organization goes away.”