In this article, drawing on leader categorization theory, we examined the influencing processes of team leaders' humor on their teams' performance. Using a time-lagged study, including 244 leaders and 815 followers in a manufacturing firm in Northern China, we found that leaders' humor is positively related to subordinates' perceptions of transformational leadership, which in turn, has a positive effect on the team's performance. In addition, we found that the relationship conflict between a team leader and his or her team members moderates the positive, indirect effect of leader humor on team performance through subordinates' transformational leadership perceptions. When the relationship conflict between the leader and his or her team members is high, leader's humor becomes more relevant to subordinates' perceptions of leader's transformational leadership, and therefore exerts a stronger positive influence on team performance. The model developed in this study furthered the current understandings on leader humor and its usefulness in practical settings.
K E Y W O R D Sdisposable income, social communication, stock market participation
| INTRODUCTIONChina's stock market has experienced tremendous growth over the past 20 years. It is now the largest market among developing countries and has significant impact on international financial markets. Compared to a more mature market, the nascent development stage of the Chinese market provides a unique opportunity to analyse people's participation decisions when a society as a whole encounters the market.This paper systematically evaluates the determinants of the new investors' participation decisions using the officially compiled account opening data at a monthly frequency and on the province level. Different from the literature that often focuses on one or a few dimensions, we evaluate the relative importance of as many dimensions as possible: disposable income, demographic variables, macroeconomic factors, stock market conditions, and social communication measures on both the level and the change of the participation decision. In addition to the standard variables, we introduce various social communication measures including the number of text messages and catering enterprises in a given province and stock market information gained through social communication. These measures are important because the Chinese stock market is dominated by retail investors, 1 whose information sources are very limited, and investing in the stock market is likely to be heavily influenced by social interactions in developing countries such as China, in which the operation of the society hinges on social relationships. As opposed to a more mature market, the rapid development of an economy and the stock market in developing countries attracts investors who possess little prior knowledge of the stock market (Bekaert, Harvey, & Lundblad, 2001), and social communication is an important channel for information exchange.We present several key findings: first, the level of participation rate is predominately determined by the income factor, followed by various measures of social communication. Second, 1 According to the China Capital Market Development Report by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the proportion of retail investors whose total value of stock holdings and cash balances were below 100,000 RMB in their security account was 81% (90%) in the Shanghai (Shenzhen) Stock Exchange in 2007, respectively.
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