Swearing at Work Boosts Team Spirit, Morale

A professor of management at England’s University of East Anglia has concluded in a study that regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as foster camaraderie.   The researchers say that swearing in front of senior staff or customers should be seriously discouraged or banned, but in other circumstances it helps employees to express frustration, stress or other feelings, and that management should consider making their work environments more accepting of spoken expletives, but with clear rules on when to rule them out.

This is abundantly clear to me working in finance: on trading floors, foul-mouthed traders on their squak boxes seem to have developed their own language composed almost entirely of off-color jokes, berating fellow workmates, and beating their chest (metaphorically, of course).

So much for propriety.