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The purpose of the research is to examine the impact of leader humor on employee job crafting. Using the insights from self-determination theory (SDT), we investigate the underlying mechanism of employees’ flow at work and the moderating role of employees’ playfulness trait.

We adopted a three-wave field survey of 306 employees recruited from various industries. The moderated mediation model was examined using latent structural equation model analysis.

Results revealed that leader humor positively affected employees’ flow at work and subsequent job crafting. Moreover, both the direct effect of leader humor on employees’ flow at work and the indirect effect of leader humor on employees’ job crafting via flow at work were amplified by employees’ playfulness trait.

Leaders are encouraged to use jokes and humorous language to facilitate job crafting among playful subordinates. Organizations can create a work environment conducive to flow at work through job redesign, regardless of employees’ levels of playfulness trait.

The paper uncovers the critical role of flow in the relationship between leader humor and employee job crafting and identifies employees’ playfulness trait as a boundary condition in which leader humor works.

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 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.

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.

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.

Advertisements facilitate certain emotions, subsequently influencing purchase intentions. Humor, as an influential way of information expression, is frequently used in ads to elicit emotions. Drawing upon literature on advertisement humor and new product purchase intention and the theory of planned behavior, the study proposes that humor stimulation in advertisements can affect consumers' new product purchase intentions, in which two process mechanisms, namely, emotional arousal and cognitive flexibility, play a mediating effect.

To test the assertions, the authors conduct three experimental studies. The authors' first study assesses the main effect between advertisement humor and purchase intentions. In the second study, the authors show the mediating effects of emotional pleasure, emotional arousal, and cognitive flexibility on the relationship between advertisement humor and purchase intentions. In the first two experiments, the authors study incremental new products. In the third study, the authors study the same mediating relationships for radically new products.

This study's results show consumers that watch humorous ads are more likely to choose new products than those who watch non-humorous ads (Study 1); compared with non-humorous ads, humorous ads can enhance emotional arousal, thus promoting cognitive flexibility and making consumers more inclined to choose new products (Study 2 and Study 3). That said, the authors find that these mediation effects are only partial.

This study's results have important implications for firms vying to enhance consumers' new product purchase intentions by deploying humorous ads.

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.

As technology increasingly integrates into the restaurant industry, avatar servers present a promising avenue for promoting healthier dining habits. Grounded in the halo effect theory and social comparison theory, this study aims to delve into the influence of avatars' appearance, humor and persuasion on healthier choices and customer satisfaction.

This paper comprises three experimental studies. Study 1 manipulates avatar appearance (supermodel-looking vs normal-looking) to examine its effects on perceived attractiveness, warmth and relatability. These factors influence customer satisfaction and healthy food choices through the psychological mechanisms of social comparison and aspirational appeal. Studies 2 and 3 further refine this theoretical model by assessing the interplay of appearance with humor (presence vs absence) and persuasion (health-oriented vs beauty-oriented), respectively.

Results suggest that avatars resembling supermodels evoke stronger aspirational appeal and positive social comparison due to their attractiveness, thus bolstering healthier choices and customer satisfaction. Moreover, humor moderates the relationship between appearance and attractiveness, while persuasion moderates the effects of appearance on social comparison and aspirational appeal.

This research bridges the halo effect theory and social comparison theory, offering insights enriching the academic discourse on technology’s role in hospitality.

The findings provide actionable insights for managers, tech developers and health advocates.

Despite its significance, avatar design research in the hospitality sector has been overlooked. This study addresses this gap, offering a guideline for crafting attractive and persuasive avatars.

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 study aims to investigate character strengths, focussing on their development over time and application from a personal perspective.

The research was conducted using an autoethnographic, semi-structured interview approach with two participants: the authors themselves.

This study explored character strengths, their commonalities across generations and how personal experiences shape them. It also highlighted how to encourage others to recognise and use their strengths.

This study also enriches character strengths theory by addressing cultural and generational differences, aligning with positive psychology 3.0 (Lomas et al., 2020). This study also introduces a unique methodological approach to explore character strengths.

This study provides novel insights for personal growth, enhancing psychological evaluations and inter-generational discourse on knowledge transfer through the lens of character strengths. These can be used to develop interventions for a range of populations.

Through this personalised and culturally relevant approach, novel insights into the longitudinal effects of interactions between individual experiences and character strengths were gained. This study emphasised the dynamic nature of strengths and drew parallels to the tenets of Indian psychology, thereby underscoring the significance of strengths as a pivotal next step in the understanding of a person.