Search results

This study aims to explore the role of team personality and leader’s humor style on the use of humor in group communication and the extent to which group humor mediates the association between team personality on the one hand, psychological safety, collective emotional intelligence and group satisfaction on the other hand.

The authors used a survey to collect data from 304 employees nested in 83 groups working in organizations from various sectors in Romania.

The study results show that extraversion is positively associated with group affiliative humor, while neuroticism has a positive association with group aggressive humor. The leader’s affiliative humor style had a significant positive effect on group affiliative humor, while the effect of leader’s aggressive humor style on the use of aggressive humor in groups was not significant. Furthermore, the authors examined the mediation role of group humor in the relationship between team personality and team emergent states and satisfaction. The authors found that group aggressive humor mediates the association between neuroticism and group emotional intelligence, psychological safety and satisfaction, while affiliative humor mediates the association between extraversion and emotional intelligence and team satisfaction.

The study reports one of the first attempts to explore the multilevel interplay of team personality and humor in groups as they relate to emergent states.

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.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper examines how managers and coworkers influence employees’ ability to cope with job stress. Its results demonstrate that transformational leadership, leader humor, high quality leader relationships and coworker support do improve coping capacity, with synergistic gains from resource combinations. Longer tenure also boosted coping ability. Key insights indicate the value of prioritizing high quality partnerships with subordinates, incorporating affiliative humor and injecting transformational behaviors into management training.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This research aims to extend the research on humorous leadership and the hospitality industry by using the theoretical framework of affective events theory (AET). This research aims to close this gap by recognizing that leaders' humor may inspire pro-social motivation in tourism workers and can harness the ability of employees to offer innovative ideas. The effect of leaders' humor on employees’ pro-social motivation is moderated by the personal need for structure (PNS).

A multi-source time-lagged design was employed in this research. The researchers used survey instruments to collect data from frontline employees and their immediate supervisors working in Pakistan’s two- to five-star hotels. The current study considers 279 useable responses and tested them through Hayes process macros.

Results show that humorous leadership has a significant direct impact on the innovative work behavior (IWB) of hotel employees. Pro-social motivation significantly mediates the relationship between humorous leadership and IWB. Further, the PNS significantly buffers the relationship between humorous leadership and pro-social motivation.

Findings are vital for hotel managers to adopt a more flexible leadership style to promote the pro-social motivation and IWBs of hotel employees.

This is one of the first studies to use pro-social motivation to explain the relationship between humorous leadership and creative work behaviors. Employees' individual needs for structure have also been utilized as a novel boundary condition. The results are essential for hotel managers to adopt a more adaptable leadership style to encourage the staff’s pro-social motivation and creative work behaviors.

Based on social information processing theory, this paper aims to explore how and when leader self-deprecating humor may spark subordinate learning from failure. The authors cast perspective taking as a novel explanatory mechanism for this indirect effect, and further consider leader–member exchange as a boundary condition of the relationship.

The authors tested the hypotheses by conducting a multiwave and multisource survey of 604 members from 152 teams in a Chinese high-technology company.

Results of multilevel path analyses demonstrate that leader self-deprecating humor positively influences subordinate learning from failure via perspective taking. Further, this mediation effect is stronger at higher levels of leader–member exchange.

This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between leader self-deprecating humor and subordinate learning from failure. However, the research design was not longitudinal or experimental, and thus the authors were unable to make strong inferences about absolute causality.

The work yields useful insights for practitioners aiming to encourage subordinates to learn from failure.

This study provides evidence that leader self-deprecating humor can stimulate subordinate learning from failure via perspective taking, and the indirect effect is further strengthened by leader–member exchange. The findings offer new directions for research on leader self-deprecating humor and learning from failure.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the communicative constitution of organizational inclusion and/or exclusion through humorous acts at the expense of members of minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups.

Semistructured interviews with 84 employees in Austria and Germany dealing with their experiences regarding diversity and inclusion (D&I) at work were conducted and analyzed in two steps. First, a thematic text analysis was performed to structure the content and identify relevant themes and anecdotes for further analysis. Second, a ventriloquial analysis sought to identify the physically absent yet present voices in these anecdotes.

The interviews revealed that jokes and quips mostly target colleagues of observable foreign origin. The analysis further identified three themes that show that disparaging humor can simultaneously reinforce inclusion/exclusion across hierarchies and create boundaries within teams – but in different ways. The findings also indicate that above all prejudices “participate” in such events and that in most cases the collective is invoked to increase the joke's “authority”.

This research is the first one that investigates humor in the context of D&I through a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) lens, which facilitates studying the constitutive character of humorous communication in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, this is one of the first empirical humor studies to draw on established theory-driven concepts of inclusion-exclusion in its analysis.

This study examines the use of dark humor in brand-to-brand communications on social media and its impact on consumers' brand perceptions. In particular, this study looks at roasting messages in which a brand humorously insults its peers.

The authors used a sampling method to recruit 286 participants from the United States. They employed an ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc analysis to test the hypotheses, as well as Hayes' PROCESS to test the mediation and moderation effects, including Johnson–Neyman procedure.

The authors found that not all customers find roasting messages funny. Rather, consumers' personality and age will influence their perceived humor of the messages and their brand evaluations. Customers who are young and extroverted are likely to believe roasting messages to be funny. They thus perceive the brand to be cooler and more sincere when using such a communication approach, compared to when the brand neutrally interacts with others. Meanwhile, brands may find less success with old and introverted customers.

This research sheds light on how the consumers' perception of humor in a roasting type of brand-to-brand communication has an impact on consumers' psychological perceptions of brand coolness and brand sincerity. To guide practitioners, it explored how the interaction between a consumer's personality and age moderates the aforementioned relationship.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to develop a resource-based model depicting a decreased level of psychological resourcefulness – relational energy, as a novel explanatory mechanism that accounts for the harm of abusive supervision, and we further investigate the role of leader humor as a boundary condition.

We applied multilevel path analysis to test our hypotheses with three-time-point survey data collected from 226 supervisor-employee dyads in a telecommunication company in China across six months.

Our results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to employee relational energy, leading to a subsequent decline in employee job performance. The predictions of the depleting effects get alleviated by leader humor.

This study foregrounds the importance of employee relationship management in the workplace and reveals that some abusive supervisors may manage to sustain employee performance and relational energy by using humor in their interactions, which necessitates immediate intervention.

These findings offer novel insights into the deleterious impact of abusive supervision by demonstrating the critical role of relational energy in dyadic interactions. We also reveal the potential dark side of leader humor in the context of abuse in the workplace.