The relationship between leader self-deprecating humor and perceived effectiveness

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.

Does My Humor Touch You? Effect of Leader Self-Deprecating Humour on Employee Silence: The Mediating Role of Leader-Member Exchange

Purpose

Silence is a typical negative behaviour exhibited by employees when they are faced with tension and stress and is influenced by a number of factors. Leaders have an important influence on employees' emotions and behaviour, but the research is not yet clear enough. In this paper, we focus on the research frontier of self-deprecating humour of leaders, aiming to analyse its effect on employee silence and discuss the mechanism of the role of leader-member exchange (LMX) in it, based on social exchange theory.

Methods

We conducted a regression analysis and bootstrap test for mediating effects based on 2531 data from 151 financial institutions in mainland China. A simple random sampling was taken of the target population to ensure an unbiased sample. Using Harman's single-factor test to check the data for common method bias. Regression analysis and Bootstrap test were used to analyze the correlation between variables and mediating effect models.

Findings

(a) Leader self-deprecating humour significantly reduces employee silence and effectively improves the quality of LMX; (b) There is a significant negative relationship between LMX and employee silence; (c) LMX plays a mediating role in the process of self-deprecating humour influencing employee silence and this mediating effect is complete; (d) Affective exchange between leaders and employees appears to be an essential factor in reducing stress from leaders and reducing employee silence.

Originality/Value

We attempt to open the black box of the mechanism of action between leader self-deprecating humour and employee silence, enrich and expand the application of social exchange theory to negative employee behavior, and provide new theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence from developing countries.

Practical Implications

The results of the study indicated that self-deprecating humor of leaders can significantly inhibit employee silence through high levels of LMX. Moreover, the mediating role played by LMX was complete. Therefore, organizations should not only focus on the role of leadership humor, but also to achieve mutual respect and trust between leaders and subordinates, and an emotional exchange that goes beyond economic relationships.

Linking Leader's Positive Humor and Employee Bootlegging: Empirical Evidence from China

Purpose

With the increasingly fierce market competitions, non-linear development of organizations through bootlegging has become a key path for enterprises to advance competitiveness. Motivating employees to carry out bootlegging in an organization is becoming an important issue many enterprises face now. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between leader's positive humor and employee bootlegging. We introduced norm violation acceptability as the mediating variable and trust in leader as the moderating variable to propose a theoretical model and verified it by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression analysis separately.

Patients and Methods

Based on both the emotion as social information theory and the social information processing theory, a sample of 278 professional employees working in an information technology (IT) enterprise of China was used to test the moderated mediation model. We used SPSS and AMOS to further verify the research model through structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression analysis.

Results

The results indicate that there is a positive relationship between leader's positive humor and employee bootlegging, which is partially mediated by norm violation acceptability. Moreover, trust in leader not only moderated the relationship between leader's positive humor and norm violation acceptability but also strengthened the influence of leader's positive humor on employee bootlegging through norm violation acceptability.

Conclusion

These findings have implications in identifying factors which contribute to employee bootlegging and providing a theoretical foundation for leaders in an organization.

Leader humor and newcomer adjustment: The mediating role of role breadth self-efficacy

Purpose

Despite the increasingly growing empirical research on leader humor, the critical issue of how and when leader humor affects newcomer adjustment was largely overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between leader humor and newcomer adjustment. Based on social information processing theory, the authors identify newcomers' role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) as the mediator and suggest that newcomers' cognitive flexibility moderates the effects.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were obtained from a 2-wave sample of 195 newcomers. The authors utilized the PROCESS procedure developed by Hayes to assess the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

Findings

The findings showed that leader humor could boost newcomers' RBSE which, in turn, was beneficial to newcomer adjustment. Besides, newcomers' cognitive flexibility plays a moderating role in the relationship between leader humor and newcomers' RBSE.

Research limitations/implications

This study utilized a cross-sectional research design, making the design difficult to obtain causal conclusions. Moreover, the data were all based on self-reports from newcomers, which may raise a concern of common method bias.

Originality/value

This paper extends the literature on leader humor and newcomer adjustment by treating RBSE as the mediator and newcomers' cognitive flexibility as the moderator. This study is one of several empirical studies to test the link between leader humor and newcomer adjustment.

As above, so below? The influence of leader humor on bootleg innovation: The mechanism of psychological empowerment and affective trust in leaders

Leadership humor is widely used in management practice and has aroused extensive discussion in academia. On account of the two-sided influence of leader humor on employees, its double-edged sword effect on employee behavior has been put more emphasis. As a benign violation of organizational norms and a kind of pro-organizational violation, respectively, both Leadership humor and employee bootleg innovation have the characteristics of violating organizational norms, but few studies have examined the relationship between them. Based on benign violation theory and social cognition theory, this study conducted a two-stage questionnaire survey and statistical-econometric analysis of 324 employees in 23 IT and manufacturing technology companies in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hubei, Beijing, and Shanghai, China. It not only examined the relationship between leadership humor and employee bootleg innovation but also tested a moderated mediation model. Results show that leadership humor is positively correlated with psychological empowerment and employee bootleg innovation, namely, leadership humor indirectly and positively affects employee bootleg innovation through psychological empowerment. Moreover, the indirect effect is positively regulated by leadership emotional trust. The higher the emotional trust of employees to leadership, the stronger the mediating role of psychological empowerment between leader humor and bootleg innovation behavior. The study enriches the existing path of research on the double-edged impact of leader humor on employee behavior, expands the boundary conditions of the relationship between empowered cognitive mediation and employee bootleg innovation and provides enlightenments for Chinese leaders to effectively apply the tool of leader humor.

The Role of Agile Women Leadership in Achieving Team Effectiveness through Interpersonal Trust for Business Agility

The need for organizations to adapt to constant change means the challenges of implementing an agile strategy. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to analyze the role of agile women leadership and team effectiveness by looking into the mediating effect of interpersonal trust based on a cross-sectional quantitative study with a sample of 269 employees from Poland and Turkey. Questionnaires were distributed to individuals in companies having women leaders or managers. The three questionnaires required the respondents to answer questions regarding the perception of agile leadership, trust and team effectiveness. By using SPSS, demographics, descriptive statistics and tests of normality were determined. Smart PLS version 3.0 was used for confirmatory factor analysis, internal accuracy and validity estimates, hypothesis checking and mediation testing. Results of PLS-SEM indicated interpersonal trust has a full mediation role between agile women leadership in shaping team effectiveness. The population of this study are working for organizations of just two countries; hence, the generalizability of the findings to other settings is unknown. Our findings contribute to the literature on women agile leadership and team effectiveness by demonstrating how the growth in trust to managers contributes to the emergence of team effectiveness and the agile leadership trend over time. This study will therefore contribute to the understanding of organized teams’ effectiveness in the perspective of agile women leadership and trust of supervisors.

The impacts of climate change on bank performance: What’s the mediating role of natural disasters?

This research estimates the effect of climate change on bank performance by considering the mediating role of natural disasters via unbalanced panel data from 2005 to 2018 in 127 countries. Moreover, this paper uses forest land, carbon dioxide emissions, and temperature change to measure climate change, takes economic loss and the number of deaths as costs of natural disasters, and utilizes the non-performing loan ratio and the ratio of bank capital to assets as bank performance. The following conclusions are reached according to our empirical evidence. First, forest land has a strong negative effect on the non-performing loan ratio. Second, forest land decreases the economic losses and deaths due to natural disasters, and natural disasters also decrease banks’ non-performing loan ratio. We also find that forest land increases the ratio of bank capital to assets through decreasing natural disasters. Third, there is a significant mediating effect of climate change on bank performance via natural disasters in high-income countries, but not in low-income countries. Finally, the decline of forest land and the rise of carbon dioxide emissions both have significantly positive effects on man-made disasters, which increase banks’ non-performing loan ratio and decrease the ratio of bank capital to assets. One policy implication is that improving climate change, preventing natural disasters, and promoting financial institutions can help decrease the economic losses of natural disasters and banks.

Humor of the Leader: A Source of Creativity of Employees Through Psychological Empowerment or Unethical Behavior Through Perceived Power? The Role of Self-Deprecating Behavior

Although we use humor in our daily communication, there still needs to cognize its effects on the attitudes and behavior of the employees. Based on benign violation theory (BVT), the study proposes that leader's humor (LH) conveys social information about counter norms. The BVT has been amalgamated with social information processing theory (SIPT) to develop hypotheses assuming the consequences of LH on the attitude and behavior of the employees. This study hypothesizes that even though LH is linked positively with employee creativity via leader-member exchange and psychological empowerment in sequence (blessing path), it may also send information to the employees about the acceptability of norm violation. This perception ultimately leads to power perception and, causes unethical behavior in the series (curse path). Moreover, this study also postulates that leader's self-deprecating humor (LSDH) moderates these indirect effects by enhancing the blessing and reducing the curse, which emerged from LH. Quantitative data of 630 software engineers from software houses based in Pakistan provided support to test the hypotheses. The results demonstrate that LH is a double-edge sword that enhances blessing (creativity) as well as curse (employee unethical behavior), whereas LSDH augments the blessing and throttles back the curse. Theoretical and managerial implications have also been discussed.

Humor in Workplace Leadership: A Systematic Search Scoping Review

Humor studies are increasingly prevalent in workplace and leadership domains, it has shown significant development in the last 40 years. The multifaceted nature of humor means varied definitions and diverse measurement approaches have been approved. As a result, research methodologies and findings are not easily clarified, and have not been synthesized. The aim of this scoping review was to review the existing body of literature relevant to humor in workplace leadership to identify key research areas, methodologies used, guiding theoretical frameworks, and gaps that are persisting over the last 40 years. Using qualitative review methods, four key themes in the research emerged relating to: (1) humor styles and outcomes; (2) humor as communication and discursive resource; (3) variables in the humor and leadership relationship; and (4) cultural context. This review demonstrates significant research progress on the topic of humor in workplace leadership. Research progress and gaps are discussed based on five key questions. Future research directions are outlined and discussed.

Does leader humor style matter and to whom?

Purpose

The interest on leader humor styles is recent. By applying a trustworthiness framework, the authors examine (1) how leader humor styles contribute to performance and deviance via trust in the supervisor and (2) who benefits/suffers the most from different leader humor styles.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors tested their hypotheses in a sample of 428 employee–supervisor dyads from 19 organizations operating in the services sector.

Findings

Affiliative and self-enhancing leader humor styles are particularly beneficial for employees with low core-self-evaluations, helping them develop trust in the supervisor and consequently improving their performance. An aggressive leader humor style, via decreased trust in the supervisor, reduces performance, regardless of employees' core self-evaluations. Self-enhancing and self-defeating leader humor styles also present significant relationships with organizational deviance.

Research limitations/implications

Limitations include the cross-sectional design and the limited number of mechanisms examined.

Practical implications

Organizations need to train leaders in the use of humor and develop a culture where beneficial humor styles are endorsed, while detrimental humor styles are not tolerated.

Originality/value

These findings contribute to the literatures on trust and humor, by showing that the use of humor is not as trivial as one could initially think, particularly for those with low core self-evaluations, and by expanding our knowledge of the mechanisms by which different leader humor styles may influence performance and deviance.

The state of research on leader humor

During the past two decades, the burgeoning literature on leader humor has documented various ways that humor enables leadership effectiveness. Yet there are problems of construct clarity and measurement associated with leader humor, as well as unanswered questions related to the theoretical frameworks and predictive value of leader humor. We provide a systematic review on leader humor, in which we address the issues of constructs—trait humor versus (behavioral) humor expression—and associated measures, discuss the main and emerging theoretical frameworks, assess the empirical literature via a meta-analysis and path analyses, and offer directions for future research. Our review not only offers theoretical insights for this research area, but also presents empirical gaps and opportunities through a quantitative summary.

Signaling trustworthiness: The effect of leader humor on feedback-seeking behavior

Given its capacity to cultivate a range of positive outcomes in the workplace, humor has been recognized as a valuable tool for leadership purposes. However, the theoretical understanding of leader humor remains relatively limited and the mechanism through which it influences follower outcomes has not been clearly identified. Drawing on signaling theory, we developed and empirically tested a model which delineates the relationship between leader humor and a specific follower behavior - proactive feedback seeking. We collected data from 304 employees and their respective leaders working in a large Canadian retail organization. Results of our analyses indicate that leader humor can impact subordinate feedback-seeking behavior via its influence on subordinates' affect-based and cognition-based trust in the leader.