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Outlines the benefits of humour in the workplace. Briefly looks at the place of humour in advertising and the effect of it in areas such as attention, comprehension, persuasion and likeability. Discusses humour in the workplace and provides some suggestions for employers. Covers humour in training and concludes that modest investment in all these areas can bring benefits to the workplace.

Until recently most managers were wary of using humour as a communication technique in the business setting, believing that the two did not mix. Now comic techniques are gaining acceptance as tools of business communication. Humour and laughter are coping skills. One of the most important tasks of a manager is to implement these skills throughout all levels of the firm to preserve the individual health of the employees and the entire firm. Humour can promote “good feelings” on the job and enhance oral presentations. Managers may not adopt a humorous approach themselves but should accept it in others and try to see the humour in situations. Those who do not want to employ humorous techniques should match it to the situation and/or audience, and never use it at the expense of an individual.

This article compares the humour used in university and corporate training programmes and discusses survey implications. Based on a survey of 183 university business professors and 243 corporate trainers, both groups were found to use similar types of humour (e.g. short stories, exaggeration), have similar reasons for using humour (e.g. help trainees relax, keep training interesting), and use humour in similar settings (e.g. humour occurs in lectures most often). Based on survey results and a literature review, both groups should consider making their humour understandable, non‐coercive, and relevant to the training situation. University and corporate trainers should also listen to what types of humour can be students like. Practising humour can be a way to gain these humour skills.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how humor can be used to help improve understanding of a message, as well as to validate the findings of the Booth‐Butterfield humor orientation scale.

The study used the Booth‐Butterfield humor orientation scale to measure the effectiveness of using humor to maintain focus on written or verbal messages.

The results showed that participants who rated higher on this scale are more apt to understand and use humor in their daily communications with each other and the home office. The study also showed that there is no significant difference in the frequency and effectiveness of humor usage by participants based on age or geographic location.

All of the managers for this conservative company are currently male. This limits any analysis of this study based on gender. It also removes gender as an additional variable, which could have complicated the results.

Humor has been proven to contribute to increases in compliance, learning, attitude shifts and enjoyment. It also contributes to improved organizational cohesiveness. By knowing whether an audience perceives humor differently, based on age or location, the sender can target the message more effectively.

This paper took the findings of the Booth‐Butterfield study and expanded the parameters to include a larger age range and demographic area to test the impact on the humor orientation scale.

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.

In this paper, we demonstrate the linkages between humor and political and cultural opportunities and present an analysis of the importance of humor for collective identity and framing in the New Atheist Movement, a social movement focused on reducing the social stigma of atheism and enforcing the separation of church and state. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of interview, ethnographic, and web-based data, we show why the New Atheist Movement is able to use humor effectively in the political and cultural environment. We further demonstrate that humor is central to the development and maintenance of collective identity and to the framing strategies used by the New Atheist Movement. Through a diverse range of forms, including jokes, mockery, and satire, humor is a form of resistance and also can be harnessed to support the goals of social movements. We use this case study as a basic for advocating for greater attention to humor within social movement studies, and greater attention to social movements in humor studies.

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.