No Laughing Matter: Workplace Bullying, Humor Orientation, and Leadership Styles

Abstract

Workplace bullying is associated with a host of negative outcomes for the worker who is the target of bullying, as well as for the organization where the bullying occurs. Moreover, we know that rates of bullying are particularly high in health care settings; however, we are less familiar with the factors that may reduce workplace bullying in hospitals. Thus, this study was conducted to determine whether the humor orientation styles of individuals, including nurses working in hospitals, as well as their managers’ leadership styles, can influence perceptions of bullying in the workplace. Using data from 459 workers employed in a large hospital in the Southern United States, we examined associations between the Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale, which has four dimensions, as well as the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, with three leadership substyles, and their associations with the risk of being bullied. We observed that one of the four humor subscales, Humor Appreciation, did affect perceptions of bullying in the workplace. The other three, Humor Recognition, Humor Production, and Humor for Coping, did not. However, the leadership styles of managers did affect reports of negative acts. In fact, transformational leadership was associated with 22% of the variance in reports of decreased bullying activity. This work is consistent with previous work on the importance of leadership styles for creating positive work environments, particularly in hospital settings. Given these findings, we offer suggestions for leaders to further improve nursing communication.

Humor in Workplace Leadership: A Systematic Search Scoping Review

“…Elevated work engagement, satisfaction, performance and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors ( Decker, 1987 ; Goswami et al, 2016 ; de Souza et al, 2019 ; Guenzi et al, 2019 ; Mills et al, 2019 ; Neves and Karagonlar, 2020 ).…”

“…• Improved employee psychological capital and wellbeing (Kim et al, 2016;Wijewardena et al, 2017). • Elevated work engagement, satisfaction, performance and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (Decker, 1987;Goswami et al, 2016;de Souza et al, 2019;Guenzi et al, 2019;Mills et al, 2019;Neves and Karagonlar, 2020). • Enhanced ability to manage organizational change (Vetter and Gockel, 2016).…”

The interaction between leadership styles and their followers' human capital: a correspondence analysis approach applied to micro-sized businesses

“…Many leadership styles have been discovered and studied, such as pragmatic, servant, authentic, ethical and spiritual styles (Anderson and Sun, 2017); empowering, paradoxical and servant styles (Huertas-Valdivia et al, 2019); and paternalistic, democratic and authentic leadership styles (Ahmed et al, 2018). Although these styles were evident in our study, we discovered that the majority of the studies used the most popular leadership styles of transformational, transactional and passive avoidant (Berkovich, 2018;Cheung et al, 2017;Kumar and Sharma, 2018;Mills et al, 2018;Nazarian et al, 2017;Ricard et al, 2017;Soliman, 2018;Yang, 2015;Zhang et al, 2018). Overall, although many leadership styles other than transformational, transactional and passive avoidant have been used, these are not pervasive.…”

“…Leadership styles can have a positive impact on the development and use of organizational learning and commitment (Ebrahim and Yahaya, 2016), job and meeting JMD 40,1 satisfaction (Abdelhafiz et al, 2016), organization subordinates' performance (Kwanya and Stilwell, 2018;Nazarian et al, 2017;Sethibe, 2017), followers' innovative behaviour (Ahmed et al, 2018;Gong et al, 2018;Hansen and Pihl-Thingvad, 2019), work engagement and commitment (Ribeiro et al, 2018), risk-taking, decision-making participation and empowerment (Huertas-Valdivia et al, 2019), career readiness (Villarreal et al, 2018), positive working environment (Mills et al, 2018), total quality management practices (Kumar and Sharma, 2018;Soliman, 2018) and building followers' trust (Yasir et al, 2016).…”

Transformational leadership encourages residents’ job crafting in surgical training: A mixed-methods study of residents’ perceptions

“…work, diminish bullying and burnout, and foster work engagement (14,15,(17)(18)(19)(20). Conversely, a transactional leadership style (TrLS) is task-oriented and aims to ful ll objectives, ensure standards and monitor outcomes (14).…”