The effects of supervisor humour on employee attitudes

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s use of four types of humour relate to employee job satisfaction, organisational pride, organisational commitment and self-esteem. Supervisor favourability is also examined as a mediating variable in these relationships. Design/methodology/approach An online survey of 216 working individuals provided data on the effect of supervisor use of humour on employee attitudes. Findings Perceptions of positive forms of humour (affiliative and self-enhancing) positively related to employee various attitudes, while aggressive humour was negatively associated with those attitudes. Results also support the intervening role of supervisor favourability in the relationship between supervisors’ positive use of humour and employees’ job satisfaction, affective commitment and organisational pride. Research limitations/implications Studies of the effects of workplace humour can benefit from using more fine-grained operationalisation of positive and negative humour. Research can also benefit from considerations of intervening mechanisms to the humour–work outcome relationship. Practical implications The results underscore the benefits of affiliative and self-enhancing humour on employee attitudes in the workplace. While negative humour can have an undesirable effect, there may be circumstances under which self-defeating humour is not negatively received. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to better understand supervisors’ use of different, more discriminating forms of humour on employee attitudes.

Formulating an organizational pride model for the National Iranian Oil Company

“…Here, the employees mentioned that the type and nature of their direct manager's relations with them affected their sense of pride toward the organization. This finding is compatible with supervisor's humor (Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2018), and employing employees in managerial decisions (Gunter & Furnham, 1996).…”

“…A study of the existing literature on organizational pride indicates that researchers in the realm of organizational behavior have pointed to major factors having potential or actual effects on organizational pride. These factors include alignment of personal, professional and organizational identities (Alias & Bahron, 2019), self-efficacy (Lu & Roto, 2016), corporate social responsibility (Hameed et al, 2019), work life balance (Mas-Machuca et al, 2016), supervisor's humor (Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2018), individual's own behavior, self-perception (Kraemer et al, 2020), occurrence of specific events, such as perception of success in personal practice (Decrop & Derbaix, 2010), achievements gained due to internal factors such as personality, ability, or personal efforts (Weiner, 1985), colleagues, work groups, or organization's successes or achievements (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), autonomy, supervision considerations, and team support (Kraemer & Gouthier, 2014), and, finally, individual, occupational, and organizational characteristics, motivation, and leader-group relationships (Appleberg, 2005). In the light of the foregoing, the following research questions were developed using the systematic method of grounded theory:…”

The Role of Employee Trust in the Relationship Between Leaders’ Aggressive Humor and Knowledge Sharing

“…Lee (2015) emphasized that self-enhancing humor can improve the subordinate's creativity. Generally, when leaders use positive humor styles, the levels of work engagement, positive emotions (Goswami et al, 2016), job satisfaction, and organizational commitment among subordinates become stronger (Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2018). A meta-analysis of 37 studies pointed out that positive humor styles are positively correlated with psychological and mental health (Schneider et al, 2018).…”

“…Unfortunately, most studies concentrate on the beneficial impact of humor (Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2012), and there are scarce empirical studies on the effects of using negative humor in the workplace (Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2018). This omission is unfortunate because negative humor can be a crucial practice to erode trust among workers and undermine knowledge-sharing (Robert et al, 2015;Long-Zeng et al, 2020).…”

How Do We Perceive a Humorous Manager? Manager Humor, Impression Management, and Employee Willingness to Work With the Manager

“…As humor may impact impression management processes ( Bitterly and Schweitzer, 2019 ), we will also examine whether employees’ impression management perceptions regarding their manager may mediate the associations between managerial humor expression and employees’ intentions to work with their manager. As for the third goal: (3) Since leadership humor expression may be perceived differently depending on the leader’s gender ( Evans et al, 2019 ), and as gender was presented as a potential moderator for future examination by several scholars ( Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2018 ; Kong et al, 2019 ), we will also investigate the moderating role of managerial gender. Finally, (4) while most, if not all, previous measurements in the literature on managerial humor have been based on employees’ and managers’ self-report, which are potential sources of social desirability and common method biases (e.g., Antonakis, 2017 ; Kong et al, 2019 ), we will further examine the research hypotheses by using an experimental design.…”