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The importance of modeling digital leadership in quickly digitizing countries, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is inevitable for building leadership capabilities to lead, engage and motivate remote employees in the digital environment. Using Blake and Mouton Grid, the current study examines the behavioral approach used by the leaders from both public and private sectors while managing their workforce digitally in the period of the pandemic, when 70% of the workforce worked remotely for the first-time in the region.

An online survey was conducted by the managerial employees working in different firms using self-administered questionnaires and adopting the snowball sampling technique. In total, 476 respondents participated in the study from both the Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The analysis using IBM SPSS and Smart PLS software reported that 9 out of 10 leaders positioned their digital leadership style well above the middle-of-the-road management style (5,5) oriented towards team management (9,9); with 7 out of 9 displaying high team management leadership style, while managing remote workers. However, millennials displayed higher task orientation when compared to generation-x leaders, who concentrated more on their relations with the workers.

The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions. Also the results highlighting the task-oriented approach of millennials digital leaders have implication for owners and board of directors of the firms that seniority is not the only credible approach for leadership positions.

The study reveals the behavioral styles beneficial for digital leaders to develop their leadership capabilities and increase their effectiveness while managing the workforce digitally. Black Mountain Grid and its two-dimensional leadership matrix has been found to be a useful conceptual approach for understanding digital leadership behaviors, and based on study findings, recommendations have been provided to effectively improve its utilization for leading teams. The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions as well as digital leadership field scholars.

The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.