Nothing to Laugh About: Student Interns' Use of Humor in Response to Workplace Dissatisfaction

Abstract

Humor is an important option for employees responding to frustrating circumstances because humorous responses can be less confrontational than alternative ways of expressing dissatisfaction. The present study examined how student interns enacted humor as a response to workplace dissatisfaction. Results indicated a continuum of humorous messages and a variety of goals motivating those messages. These findings demonstrate the nuances in humor as a way of communicating dissatisfaction while also underscoring the need to further understand how goals and outcomes are related as employees dissent. At a deeper level, these results speak to issues of power and identity as low-positioned, contingent employees used humor to recast their identities apart from their status and to negotiate the boundaries of acceptable communication.

Installation humor: a resistive social practice identified in the engineering workplace

“…First, this paper extends research on workplace humor (e.g. Lyttle, 2007;Garner et al, 2015;Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017;Tripathy, 2018;Huber, 2022) by providing mini-cases (Tsoukas, 2011;Yin, 2018) of a resistive humor form we identified and named installation humor. Recognizing resistive expressions of humor would be important for managers to recognize, especially during change management initiatives that directly affect the workers' daily work lives.…”

“…Humor is both an intellectual act as well as a form of social play that takes many forms, from salient to demure, and is aimed at producing an emotional response and collective agency (Wilkins and Eisenbraun, 2009;Martin and Ford, 2018). The act of humor is an interactive one (Fine and De Soucey, 2005) and is acknowledged by the humor recipient as either a positive, negative or neutral occurrence or as the conclusion of the social interaction (Romero and Cruthirds, 2006;Garner et al, 2015;Tripathy, 2018). Martin (2010) describes humor as a phenomenon that is attributed to the planning or sayings of people that are produced with the intention of being funny and to evoke laughter.…”

The power of humour to unite and divide: a case study of design coordination meetings in construction

“…These studies have focused on occurrences, prevalence, and effect of displays; often they are heavily coded and quantified and in doing so lose a great deal of contextual information, which is critical for understanding humour (Lehman-Willenbrock and Allen 2014). Where other designs have been employed, they have relied on selfreport recall of events (see Garner et al 2015) or contrived designs where conditions have been set up to elicit humour such as banter (see Haugh and Pillet-Shore 2018). Very few studies have directly examined "in vivo" humour (except for Kangasharju andNikko 2009, McCreaddie andWiggins 2008).…”

Simulating Dissent: Mapping the Life Span of Organizational Dissent using Agent-Based Modeling

“…For example, a dissenter's goal(s) predicts how she or he expresses dissent (Garner, 2009a). Garner, Chandler, and Wallace (2015) also explained that the alignment between goals and outcomes likely influences longer-term perceptions of dissent conversations in that dissenters are satisfied if the outcome matches their goal. Teleological mechanisms explain processes based on goal-directed behaviors.…”

“…While a wide assortment of goals are possible (Garner, 2009a;Garner et al, 2015), choosing only two simplified the model. Users also set the dissent audience's goals (either accomplish change, support emotion, status quo, reject dissent).…”