Swearing bosses drive away the workers they most need to keep

The research most bosses would rather ignore

Profanity in the workplace tends to get filed under harmless colour, the sign of a leader who is real and unpolished. New research published in July 2026 by Loughborough University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa suggests that read is mostly wrong. Across 5,660 employees in 19 countries, the headline finding was blunt: overall, employees were less satisfied with supervisors who frequently used profanity.

The interesting part is who liked it. Employees with psychopathic and machiavellian traits, marked by lower empathy and a willingness to disregard social norms, reported greater satisfaction with their leader as the swearing increased. To them a sweary boss reads as more genuine and confident. Those with narcissistic traits were largely indifferent. Everyone else, the majority without strong dark-triad traits, responded negatively.

Sit with that for a second. If your communication style is only landing with the least empathetic people on your team, you are optimising your culture for exactly the wrong hires.

Where a team sits changes the answer

Geography and culture shift the picture too. In high-equality societies like Sweden and Austria, personality differences were visible, so the same manager could read as approachable to one worker and unprofessional to another. In lower-equality societies like South Africa and Mexico, those individual differences vanished and employees reacted negatively across the board. The researchers put it down to hierarchy: where the gap between boss and worker feels larger, swearing reads as dominance rather than authenticity.

New Zealand sits in the middle, relatively egalitarian by global standards but with an increasingly diverse workforce. The practical takeaway is that a single communication style will not land the same way across an entire team. As the researchers concluded, “the same sentence can inspire one employee, offend another and leave a third completely unmoved… Knowing your team is just as important as choosing the right (or wrong) words”.

The retention maths in a soft labour market

It is tempting to shrug this off in a contracting market. Stats NZ data for the March 2026 quarter put total filled jobs at 2.26 million, down from 2.33 million a year earlier. When staff have fewer options, employers feel less pressure to keep them happy.

That is the wrong way to read it. The best people always have options, and losing a strong performer to a competitor over an avoidable culture problem is a direct commercial cost, not a soft one. In small firms especially, the boss is the culture. There is no HR department to absorb the friction or mediate the fallout.

The trap NZ law sets for loose-language bosses

Here is where it gets sharp. Under the Employment Relations Act 2000, dismissal is only justifiable for gross misconduct and only after a fair process. But the case law creates a specific trap for employers who tolerate or model swearing from the top.

In Waihape v AFFCO New Zealand Limited, the Employment Relations Authority found that where several people including management regularly swore in day-to-day banter, an employer would struggle to justify disciplining a single staff member for bad language. Inconsistent enforcement gutted the disciplinary case. As NBR’s legal analysis noted in 2025, context is everything: the same conduct may warrant dismissal in one workplace and not another, depending on the norms already established.

The implication is uncomfortable. A boss who swears freely sets a norm that is very hard to walk back. When that culture later produces a harassment complaint or a conduct issue, the employer’s ability to act is compromised by their own prior behaviour. You cannot enforce a standard you have spent years undermining.

What this means for owners and managers

This is not a call to install a swear jar or issue a memo. It is a question of whether a habit you treat as personality is actually a retention and liability risk you have not priced. The research says most of your team quietly likes it less than you assume, the minority who enjoy it are not the people you want defining your culture, and New Zealand’s legal framework will hold your own conduct against you if things go wrong. The words are free. The culture they build is not.

Sources

• A sweary boss might make you work harder (or want to quit) – Loughborough University (2026-07)
• How a sweary boss might make you want to work harder, or quit (2026-08-01)
• A sweary boss might make you work harder (or want to quit) (2026-07-27)
• Can I be fired for swearing at work? NZ Employment Relations (2024-12-10)
• Business employment data: March 2026 quarter (2026)
• Employment indicators: September 2025 (2025-09)