Sex Conflict and Impressions of Managers’ Aggressive Humor

Humor-Value Assessment as a Function of Sex, Age, and Education

A sense of humor may be related to our survival, yet the value one places on humor is typically not very explicit. Sex, age, and education were selected as variables to examine how participants would respond to Vitulli's Humor Rating Scale. 217 volunteers (108 men and 109 women) were distributed among four levels of education: Grade 8, high school, college, and a combined sample of graduate students and professors. The rating scale measured attitudes toward male-oriented humor, female-oriented humor, general humor values, and an index of “differentiation of humor by gender.” Significant interactions between sex and humor scales and between educational levels and humor scales were found in a 2 × 4 × 4 factorial (split-plot) design. Scheffé tests of multiple comparisons between sample means showed significant sex differences on the male-oriented scale and on the differentiation scale. Significant differences between educational levels occurred on the male- and female-oriented scales, as well as on the differentiation scale. The ‘egalitarian hypothesis’ and the ‘androgyny hypothesis’ were evaluated to assess under what conditions they do or do not account for the data.

MANAGERIAL HUMOR AND SUBORDINATE SATISFACTION

Humor may be a useful managerial tool, contributing to effectiveness and subordinate satisfaction. A survey explored 290 workers' job satisfaction and impressions of supervisors as a function of subject age, subject sex, supervisor sense of humor, and supervisor sexual humor. Subjects rating their supervisors high in sense of humor reported higher job satisfaction and rated other supervisor qualities higher than did subjects rating their supervisors low in sense of humor. In general, the differences between ratings, given low and high sense of humor supervisors, were greater for younger (under 15) subjects than older. Older females downgraded supervisors who used sexual humor, while younger females and males did not. Future research should attempt to relate humor to objective measures of leader effectiveness.