Can the fist bump mix with business?

— -- The handshake may always have a firm grip on business, but the fist bump is making inroads — albeit in the face of some resistance.

"I have not encountered a fist bump and would judge anyone who tried it as a total redneck," says Dr. Grace Keenan, medical director of Nova Medical and Urgent Care Center in Ashburn, Va. "I hope that it never is seen as a replacement for a handshake in the business community."

But Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha, a search engine company in Carmel, Ind., says he now has a business fist-bump encounter about monthly. David Lingafelter, president of faucet-maker Moen in North Olmsted, Ohio, says he is fist-bumped about twice monthly, where it was non-existent a couple of years ago.

So far, executives say, it is exchanged almost exclusively among male business associates who are otherwise friends, or in informal settings such as the end of a golf round. Fist bumping, or two people tapping fists lightly, has a long way to go to unseat the handshake, a gesture that goes back to medieval times when opponents used it to indicate that they were friendly and unarmed.

Tradition rules, for now

The handshake has been a part of business since the dawn of commerce and is too entrenched to be replaced, says University of Iowa management professor Greg Stewart, who recently completed a study confirming that a firm handshake at a job interview is as helpful as a dead-fish handshake is detrimental. The study is scheduled to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Fist bumps did not come up during the research, but Stewart strongly discourages them at job interviews.

Tim Houlne, CEO of Working Solutions, a call-center outsource company that contracts with 76,000 work-at-home agents, says he thinks the fist bump is a fad. He saw one business acquaintance initiate so many at a social event that "it began to feel awkward and uncomfortable."

Houlne says he used to do it with his children, but even that stopped once they turned 10.