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Substantial research has examined the pivotal role of supervisor positive humor in generating employee outcomes. To date, though, little is known about the relationship between supervisor humor and newcomers’ adjustment. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this gap by examining the effect of supervisor positive humor on newcomers’ adjustment. In doing so, the authors highlighted relational identification with the supervisor as a mediating mechanism that explains the aforementioned association.

Data were drawn from 117 newcomers. In order to collect the data the authors used the snowball method. Also, hierarchical regression analysis was conducted.

The results demonstrated that supervisor positive humor affects employees’ relational identification with the supervisor which, in turn, positively relates to newcomers’ adjustment.

Data were collected using a cross-sectional design and, therefore, the authors cannot directly assess causality. Moreover, the authors used self-report measures which may strengthen the causal relationships.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study that illustrates the role of supervisor humor in enhancing both newcomers’ relational identification and adjustment.

This paper aims to study the effects of widespread stress and uncertainty that is characteristic of organizational crises on service employees and to explore the extent to which organizations may proactively use supervisors’ positive humor and discretionary organizational support that goes above and beyond service employee expectations to mitigate the pandemic’s negative impact on work engagement.

Cross-sequential survey-based data was collected from 172 service employees during the height of the pandemic to assess service employees’ perceptions of both their supervisors’ use of positive humor and their employers’ discretionary organizational support in response to the emotion-laden stress and uncertainty surrounding COVID-19. PROCESS analysis was used to test the hypotheses and to conduct supplementary analyses.

Results suggest employee perceptions of supervisors’ use of positive humor positively impact dimensions of work engagement at Time 1. This engagement then positively impacts extra-role behavior, innovativeness and pride at Time 2. The impact from supervisor humor to the outcomes is fully mediated through work engagement. From a moderation perspective, discretionary organizational support was shown as a substitute for creating work engagement at low levels of supervisor humor suggesting that the two “resource builders” can act as substitutes in creating engagement.

This paper provides unique insights into both the valuable role of positive workplace humor for service workers’ work engagement during times of widespread crisis and the moderating role discretionary organizational support plays when perceptions of humor are relatively low. Moreover, the supplemental examination of the multidimensional work engagement construct as a mediator between humor and the service outcomes of extra-role behavior, innovativeness and organizational pride provides unique insights into how a crisis context may deferentially affect the experience and implications of engagement for other service worker outcomes. Understanding the proactive, ameliorative role in service effectiveness played by supervisor humor and discretionary organizational support during crises is an emerging question for service research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s use of four types of humour relate to employee job satisfaction, organisational pride, organisational commitment and self-esteem. Supervisor favourability is also examined as a mediating variable in these relationships.

An online survey of 216 working individuals provided data on the effect of supervisor use of humour on employee attitudes.

Perceptions of positive forms of humour (affiliative and self-enhancing) positively related to employee various attitudes, while aggressive humour was negatively associated with those attitudes. Results also support the intervening role of supervisor favourability in the relationship between supervisors’ positive use of humour and employees’ job satisfaction, affective commitment and organisational pride.

Studies of the effects of workplace humour can benefit from using more fine-grained operationalisation of positive and negative humour. Research can also benefit from considerations of intervening mechanisms to the humour–work outcome relationship.

The results underscore the benefits of affiliative and self-enhancing humour on employee attitudes in the workplace. While negative humour can have an undesirable effect, there may be circumstances under which self-defeating humour is not negatively received.

This paper fulfils an identified need to better understand supervisors’ use of different, more discriminating forms of humour on employee attitudes.

The idea of using positive humor as a managerial tool is gaining traction in both academia and organizations. The purpose of this paper is to test whether supervisors' use of positive humor in organizations in different perceived cultures (hierarchical, clan, market and adhocracy) influences employees' in-role and extra role performance.

The sample includes 317 clinical and non-clinical employees in public hospitals in Palermo, Italy. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling.

Results indicate that supervisor positive humor has a direct relationship with employee in-role and extra-role performance. Also, supervisor positive humor has a moderating impact on the relationship between organizational culture and in-role and extra-role performance. Moderating effect of supervisor humor have a greater impact on extra-role performance towards individuals or organizational citizenship behavior toward individuals (OCBI).

The first limitation is that this study examines only positive or adaptive kinds of leader humor; negative or maladaptive humor is not included. A further limitation is the role of social (national) organizational culture in our construct. It is claimed that, specific components of national organizational culture are more significant compared with others and that some national organizational cultures are more vital to performance in one part of the organization compared to others (Nazarian et al., 2017). Hofstede's original four dimensions of national culture: power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity/femininity could be analyzed separately to investigate the role of each variable on the study’s construct.

As Romero and Cruthirds (2006) mentioned, organizations can establish “humor-training seminars” to make the supervisor and team members aware of the benefits of humor in the workplace. For instance, subjects such as appropriate types of humor, gender and ethical differences in appreciating the humor, and matching the humor style with the specific organizational outcome can be discussed. To understand and apply appropriate organizational culture in public organizations, it is beneficial to know which types of culture encourage employee in-role/extra-role performance. This study compared the consequences of the specific dominant culture in relation to the objective of the organization. However, one solution does not fit all. Sometimes managers inevitably follow trends in their industries without noticing other variables (Mason, 2007).

As Romero and Cruthirds (2006) mentioned, organizations can establish “humor-training seminars” to make the supervisor and team members aware of the benefits of humor in the workplace. For instance, subjects such as appropriate types of humor, gender and ethical differences in appreciating the humor, and matching the humor style with the specific organizational outcome can be discussed.

This paper provides evidence to suggest that supervisor humor results in greater employee in-role and extra-role performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine affective events theory (AET) by testing the mediating effect of employees’ positive affect at work in the relationships of leaders’ use of positive humor with employees’ work engagement, job performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs); and the moderating effect of transformational leadership style on the relationship between leaders’ use of positive humor and subordinate’s positive affect at work.

Data were obtained from 235 full-time employees working for a large information technology and business consulting corporation. Moderated mediation (Hayes, 2013) was performed to test the proposed model.

Leaders’ positive humor was related to creation of subordinates’ positive emotions at work and work engagement. Positive emotions at work did not mediate between leaders’ humor and performance or OCBs. In addition, leaders’ use of transformational leadership style made the relationship between leaders’ positive humor and employees’ positive emotions at work stronger.

This study provides evidence of the positive relationship of leaders’ positive humor with employees’ positive emotions at work and work engagement. Such knowledge may help to inform the training workshops in humor employed by practitioners and potentially create a more enjoyable and fun workplace, which can lead to greater employee engagement.

AET helps explain effects of leader humor, but the effects of are complex. Leader’s use of even positive humor is most likely to have favorable effects mainly depending on their leadership style (transformational) and if their humor successfully leads to positive emotions among employees.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of humor work climate on innovative work behavior of back-office employees in the banking industry in Russia.

Data was collected via an online survey that included scales to measure humor climate and innovative work behavior. The survey was distributed electronically among employees of one department of a bank. The sample included 104 back-office employees (response rate 60.4%). Correlation and regression analyses were used.

The results indicate that humor climate fosters employee innovative work behavior. Positive humor contributes to innovative work behavior more than remaining humor climate dimensions (i.e. negative humor, outgroup humor and supervisory support). Only position type (managers vs non-managers), and not gender, education and job tenure, was found to have a significant impact on employee perceptions of humor climate and innovative work behavior exhibition.

This study adds to the limited empirical evidence on the links between humor and innovative work behavior, especially at a group level. This study focused on humor climate as a multidimensional construct, whereas previous research mostly explored positive forms of humor in relation to different social aspects of the organization. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is first to use a validated scale to explore connections between innovative work behavior and humor climate.

The purpose of this study is to understand the leadership humour style and the mechanism through which leadership humour style transforms into follower’s workplace positive and negative outcomes such as thriving at work and burnout. It uses comprehensive elaboration theory and relational process theory to explore self-disclosure and perceived similarity as two new constructs to assess their relation to intrapsychic (self-enhancing and self-defeating) and interpersonal (affiliative and aggressive) leader’s humour style, respectively.

An exploratory qualitative study through semi-structured interviews was conducted with 10 leaders to understand the different aspects of leadership humour and their outcomes. Based on these dimensions, a questionnaire was created and sent to 200 respondents, and 158 responses were received. The empirical analysis of data was done by building structural equation modeling using smart partial least square.

The empirical study has shown that self-enhancing leadership humour is related to self-disclosure, and both affiliative and aggressive leadership humour styles are related to perceived similarity. When looking at the two critical outcomes of leadership humour, both perceived similarity and self-disclosure were related to social intimacy and thriving at work. The mediation effect showed that self-enhancing humour leads to self-disclosure which increases social intimacy leading to improving thriving at work and aggressive humour leads to norm violation which further leads to burnout.

The study has used the mixed methodology to understand leadership humour and its outcomes by conducting in-depth interviews with leaders and also provides empirical evidence related to leadership humour style by using the survey to collect data from the followers capturing their perceptions. And very critically, it has explored self-disclosure and perceived similarity as two new constructs to see their relation to leadership humour style and positive and negative outcomes at the workplace.

The benefits of humor for general well‐being have long been touted. Past empirical research has suggested that some of these benefits also exist in the work domain. However, there is little shared understanding as to the role of humor in the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to address two main gaps in the humor literature. First, the authors summarize several challenges researchers face in defining and operationalizing humor, and offer an integrative conceptualization which may be used to consolidate and interpret seemingly disparate research streams. Second, meta‐analysis is used to explore the possibility that positive humor is associated with: employee health (e.g. burnout, health) and work‐related outcomes (e.g. performance, job satisfaction, withdrawal); with perceived supervisor/leader effectiveness (e.g. perceived leader performance, follower approval); and may mitigate the deleterious effects of workplace stress on employee burnout.

The authors examine the results of prior research using meta‐analysis (k=49, n=8,532) in order to explore humor's potential role in organizational and employee effectiveness.

Results suggest employee humor is associated with enhanced work performance, satisfaction, workgroup cohesion, health, and coping effectiveness, as well as decreased burnout, stress, and work withdrawal. Supervisor use of humor is associated with enhanced subordinate work performance, satisfaction, perception of supervisor performance, satisfaction with supervisor, and workgroup cohesion, as well as reduced work withdrawal.

Profitable avenues for future research include: clarifying the humor construct and determining how current humor scales tap this construct; exploring the role of negative forms of humor, as they likely have different workplace effects; the role of humor by coworkers; a number of potential moderators of the humor relationships, including type of humor, job level and industry type; and personality correlates of humor use and appreciation.

The authors recommend caution be exercised when attempting to cultivate humor in the workplace, as this may raise legal concerns (e.g. derogatory or sexist humor), but efforts aimed at encouraging self‐directed/coping humor may have the potential to innocuously buffer negative effects of workplace stress.

Although psychologists have long recognized the value of humor for general well‐being, organizational scholars have devoted comparatively little research to exploring benefits of workplace humor. Results underscore benefits of humor for work outcomes, encourage future research, and offer managerial insights on the value of creating a workplace context supportive of positive forms of humor.

The interest on leader humor styles is recent. By applying a trustworthiness framework, the authors examine (1) how leader humor styles contribute to performance and deviance via trust in the supervisor and (2) who benefits/suffers the most from different leader humor styles.

The authors tested their hypotheses in a sample of 428 employee–supervisor dyads from 19 organizations operating in the services sector.

Affiliative and self-enhancing leader humor styles are particularly beneficial for employees with low core-self-evaluations, helping them develop trust in the supervisor and consequently improving their performance. An aggressive leader humor style, via decreased trust in the supervisor, reduces performance, regardless of employees' core self-evaluations. Self-enhancing and self-defeating leader humor styles also present significant relationships with organizational deviance.

Limitations include the cross-sectional design and the limited number of mechanisms examined.

Organizations need to train leaders in the use of humor and develop a culture where beneficial humor styles are endorsed, while detrimental humor styles are not tolerated.

These findings contribute to the literatures on trust and humor, by showing that the use of humor is not as trivial as one could initially think, particularly for those with low core self-evaluations, and by expanding our knowledge of the mechanisms by which different leader humor styles may influence performance and deviance.

This study aims to explore the enabling and suppressing effects of leader affiliative and aggressive humor on employee knowledge sharing form the lens of emotional contagion process, which provides theoretical reference for the applications of different leader humor style, thereby enhancing employee knowledge sharing.

This study collected three waves of data and surveyed 379 employees in China. Regression analysis, bootstrapping and latent moderation structural equation were adopted to test the hypotheses.

Leader affiliative humor has a positive impact on employee knowledge sharing, whereas leader aggressive humor has a negative impact on employee knowledge sharing. Positive emotion plays a mediating role between leader affiliative humor and employee knowledge sharing, and negative emotion plays a mediating role between leader aggressive humor and employee knowledge sharing. Moreover, supervisor–subordinate Guanxi moderates the relationship between leader affiliative humor and positive emotion, and between leader aggressive humor and negative emotion, respectively.

This study not only adds to the knowledge sharing literature calling for the exploration of antecedents and mechanism of employee knowledge sharing, but also contributes to our comprehensive understanding of the suppressing and enabling effects of leader humor style on employee knowledge sharing. Besides, this study also unpacks the dual-path mechanism and boundary condition between leader humor style and employee knowledge sharing and augments the theoretical explanations of emotional contagion theory between leader humor style and employee knowledge sharing.