Search results

This study investigates the structural relationships among humor leadership, psychological empowerment, innovative behavior, and job performance in the Korean hotel industry. This study reveals following key major findings. First, a leader’s use of humor in leadership significantly and positively influences an employee’s psychological empowerment. Second, an employee’s psychological empowerment significantly and positively influences innovative behavior and job performance. However, innovative behavior does not significantly influence job performance. In the final section, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The study of humor has a long tradition in philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communications. Evidence from these fields suggests that humor can have effects on creativity, cohesiveness, and performance, but organizational scholars have paid it relatively little attention. We hope to “jump-start” such a research program. To do this, we first outline the theoretical rationale underlying the production and appreciation of humor, namely, its motivational, cognitive, and emotional mechanisms. Next, we review the literature linking humor to creativity, cohesiveness, and other performance-relevant outcomes. In particular, we note how this literature is theoretically well-grounded, but that the empirical findings are largely correlational and/or based on qualitative research designs. Finally, we go beyond the current humor literature by developing specific predictions about how culture might interact with humor in organizational contexts. Throughout the paper, we discuss possible research directions and methodological issues relevant to the study of humor in organizations.

Humor is an abundant and valuable, yet unfortunately underutilized, resource in organizations. When effectively wielded, humor has been proposed as a “managerial tool” that can be used to achieve positive organizational outcomes. Using Affective Events Theory and the Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions as a theoretical base, the authors attempt to test this proposition of humor being used as a managerial tool by conceptualizing a link between manager's use of humor and the consequent build up of resilience in employees in the long run.

Healthy and adaptive strategies for regulating emotions and coping with the demands of their jobs can help school-level leaders mitigate the factors and forces heightening the emotional aspects of their work, stave off the negative effects of work intensification and achieve wellness. As with most individuals in most professions, school-level leaders use several different strategies to manage their emotions and cope with the stresses associated with their work. Some of these coping strategies are associated with positive outcomes including situation selection and exercising autonomy over their workday, talking to colleagues, reappraisal, humour, controlled breathing, exercise and engaging in hobbies outside of work. However, even the most experienced and effective school-level leaders demonstrate a proclivity for engaging in coping strategies associated with maladaptive and negative outcomes. These maladaptive strategies include worrying about events over which they have little or no control, masking one's emotions using expressive suppression, using thought suppression to deal with symptoms of emotional exhaustion, distraction, manipulating the emotions of others as well as use of illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol and other forms of self-medication. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how there can be some overlap between these strategies in practice and how they are classified.

One recent direction for leadership research has been the use of purely qualitative data and qualitative analysis. One analytical method used in this phenomenological research has been the full grounded theory method. That method has generated social process theories about leadership in organizational settings. The present research operationalizes those theories into questionnaire format. This operationalized work gives support to a one-factor model for social processes of leadership (SPL) in organizations. It also identifies four lower-order social processes of leadership. Concurrent validity is concluded from a high correlation with Bass & Avolio’s and Podsakoff’s transformational leadership constructs. The correlations are so high that the SPL scale might be tapping the same underlying construct as transformational leadership. The augmentation effect of transformational leadership over (transactional) management is also supported. Support has been obtained for ongoing grounded theory-based research into the social processes of leadership and influence, and related phenomena, in organizations.

The article addresses the relationship between social distance and charismatic leadership. Current theories of charismatic leadership in organizations have borrowed ideas from the literature on socially distant charismatic leaders and applied them to leadership situations that involve direct contacts between leaders and their immediate subordinates. This article argues that while social distance is not a necessary condition for charismatic leadership, there are fundamental differences between distant charismatic leadership and close charismatic leadership. The article attempts to identify these differences through a theoretical analysis of the two leadership situations and through an exploratory content analysis of interviews about close and distant charismatic leaders.

The study of corporate psychopaths has gone from something which some academic peers found somewhat incredible, and even laughable, in 2005, to an area where an increasing amount of research is taking place across many disciplines. The paradigmatic view in 2005 was that psychopaths were criminal and, therefore, to be found in prisons and not in ‘respectable’ corporations. That chapters like this on corporate psychopaths and destructive leadership are now invited in 2020 for inclusion in academic management books that illustrates how relatively quickly the idea that psychopaths are found in corporations has gained acceptance. Nonetheless, destructive, unethical and psychopathic leadership is, by and large, still unexpected in the workplace, and this magnifies its impact as employees struggle to know how to deal with it. Such destructive leadership is also jarring and quite often traumatic for the employees concerned as well as being damaging to the organisations involved. This chapter examines psychopathic leadership and outlines its importance. This subject has been covered before in books and other chapters which describe psychopaths as organisational destroyers and producers of a climate of fear. Therefore, an aim of this chapter is to present some of the most up-to-date findings on corporate psychopaths and how they influence their environment via abusive supervision involving discrimination, ridicule and lowered job satisfaction. Abusiveness and unfairness lead to employees experiencing workplace stress and reduced mental health. The implications of corporate psychopathy for corporate legal responsibility are only just being considered as lawyers, ethicists and philosophers engage with this difficult subject.