Laughing with me or laughing at me? The differential effects of leader humor expressions on follower status and influence at work

Abstract

Although research suggests that leader humor shapes followers' perceptions of their leaders' status, questions remain as to whether and how leader humor can shape followers' own acquisition of status at work. Drawing from the approach-avoidance framework, we provide an important extension to the leader humor literature by developing a serial mediation model that explains how and why two styles of leader humor-aggressive humor and affiliative humor-differentially impact followers' ability to garner and wield social influence in the work environment. We theorize that leader aggressive humor, which constitutes unconstrained execution of power that is invasive and hostile in nature, produces a status-suppressing effect by activating followers' avoidance system, whereas leader affiliative humor, which constitutes relational connection with restrained superiority, produces a status-enabling effect by activating followers' approach system. We further propose that leader aggressive (affiliative) humor has a negative (positive) indirect effect on followers' constructive voice and work engagement via their avoidance (approach) orientation and workplace status. We find consistent support for our hypothesized predictions across two survey studies. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this study.

How leader humor stimulates subordinate boundary-spanning behavior: A social information processing theory perspective

“…In this research, we are interested in humor as a behavior rather than sense of humor as a trait ( Martin and Lefcourt, 1984 ), as this definition is broad enough to include all types and forms of humor (e.g., affiliative humor, visual images) ( Cooper, 2008 ) and also captures interpersonal phenomenon through actor sharing and target perceiving ( Cooper, 2005 ), which is appropriate in our research. In line with prior work ( Pundt and Herrmann, 2015 ; Kim et al, 2016 ; Cooper et al, 2018 ; Carnevale et al, 2022 ), we consider leader humor at the individual level because members of the same work group may have different perceptions of their leader’s humor. Past research has illustrated the positive effects of leader humor on job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, and team performance ( Hughes and Avey, 2009 ; Mao et al, 2017 ; Cooper et al, 2018 ).…”

Is Thinking the Big Picture a Leader's Favorite in Psychologically Safe Conditions During Covid-19?

“…When leaders remove barriers to hierarchical communication (Lapointe and Vandenberghe, 2018), they create an organizational climate of trust and psychological safety where employees feel safe not only to share advice with colleagues, but more importantly to ask work-related questions (Weiss et al, 2018). Leader personality traits may have indirect effects, positive or negative, on members' voice and work engagement with workplace status (Carnevale et al, 2022;Park et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022). Research has found that leaders' threats to judge employees' voices can lead to lower performance appraisals of employees (Weiss & Morrison, 2019;Xu et al, 2019), so employees may change their voiceover styles in line with their supervisors' perceptions of workplace behavior (Ng et al, 2022； Park et al, 2022.…”

Impact of leader aggressive humor on employee extra-role behaviors: opposite moderating effects of team identification and professional identification

“…Second, drawing from the sociometer theory, we propose feeling ostracized as the specific intermediary mechanism that links leader aggressive humor to employee extra-role behaviors. In so doing, we enrich the fruitful effort of recent theoretical attempts to comprehend leader aggressive humor from the approach-avoidance perspective (Carnevale et al. , 2022), social exchange perspective (Liu et al.…”

“…(2003) argue that leader aggressive humor is always intended to tease and “put down” subordinates to display a leader's superiority without regard for the painful impact on followers. Although scholars have posited that leader aggressive humor is a maladaptive behavior that leads to adverse impacts on employees, such as suppressing employee voice (Carnevale et al. , 2022; Liu et al.…”

“…The study makes several contributions. First, scholars have found that leader aggressive humor will inhibit employee voice and keep employee silence (Carnevale et al. , 2022; Liu et al.…”