The double‐edged sword effect of leader humor on employee thriving at work

Abstract

Despite the importance of leader humor in sustaining organizational effectiveness, little is known about how and when leader humor affects employee thriving, an important indicator of employee personal growth and organizational sustainable human capital. Drawing on and extending the socially embedded model of thriving at work, this study takes a balanced view and investigates the positive and negative impacts of leader humor on employee thriving. On the one hand, we propose that leader humor is related to information inadequacy, which hinders employee thriving. On the other hand, we argue that leader humor enables employees' positive affect, which enhances their level of thriving. Three‐wave data collected from 268 employees working in various industries support our hypotheses. The findings show that high‐quality information and affect resources exchange relationships with teammates (i.e., team–member exchange) alleviate the detrimental effect of leader humor on information adequacy but do not affect its beneficial effect on positive affect, which facilitates employee thriving as a whole. This study has practical implications on how practitioners can capitalize on leader humor and build a thriving workforce.