Gender, formal organizational status and humor use: perceptions of social acceptance

Aggressive Humor and Social Connectedness: The Moderating Roles of Subjective Social Status and Gender

Aggressive humor has been conceived as a maladaptive humor style that jeopardizes social relationships. However, past studies have yielded inconsistent findings regarding the detrimental effects of aggressive humor on social relationships. This study attempts to advance the existing literature by examining the gender difference in the moderating role of subjective social status in the association between aggressive humor and social connectedness. Participants were 228 (53.1% female) adults aged from 18 to 53 years (M = 23.19, SD = 6.43). The hypothesized moderated moderation effect was significant, suggesting that gender significantly moderated the moderating effect of subjective social status on the association between aggressive humor and social connectedness. Subjective social status significantly moderated the association between aggressive humor and social connectedness for men but not for women. For men, aggressive humor was negatively associated with social connectedness when subjective social status was low or medium, but the association was not significant when subjective social status was high. For women, aggressive humor was not associated with social connectedness regardless of subjective social status. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The Impact of Leader Humor on Employee Creativity during the COVID-19 Period: The Roles of Perceived Workload and Occupational Coping Self-Efficacy

Based on the relief theory and similarity attraction theory, this study investigates the influence of leader humor on employee creativity through the mediate impact of employees’ perceived workload, occupational coping self-efficacy, and employee similarity perception with a leader as a potential moderator. The data were collected through an online survey that included matched questionnaire data from 351 employees and their direct leaders in China. This study used SPSS 26 software and Mplus 7.0 software to analyze the data and found that (1) leader humor has a significant positive impact on employees’ creativity; (2) employees’ perceived workload and occupational coping self-efficacy mediated the positive relationship between leader humor and employee creativity; (3) similarity perception negatively moderated the influence of leader humor on perceived workload, and it also positively moderated the influence of leader humor on occupational coping self-efficacy. In addition to corroborating and expanding on previous findings regarding the relationship between leader humor and employee creativity during the COVID-19 period, the aforementioned conclusions also derive management implications for fostering employee creativity and reducing employee workload from the perspective of leader humor.

Positive Humor and Work Withdrawal Behaviors: The Role of Stress Coping Styles in the Hotel Industry Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

Working in the hospitality industry is stressful due to the intensive workload and extended work hours; this stress has increased after the COVID-19 pandemic due to high levels of job insecurity, downsizing, and laying off procedures. Employees in the hotel industry can deal with stress positively by utilizing task-coping styles or negatively by emotion- and avoidance-coping styles. Building on the transactional theory of stress and coping, and the benign violation theory of humor, the current study explores the relationships between positive humor and work withdrawal behaviors with the mediating effects of coping styles. A total of 407 hotel employees participated, and the obtained data were analyzed by structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS). The results asserted that affiliative humor is able to reduce coping with stresses via the negative styles and to increase coping with stresses via the positive style. The results also demonstrated the ability of task-coping in reducing work withdrawal behavior. Significant insights into theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.