Multilevel modeling study of humorous leadership

• Main Authors: Wang, Ya-Ping, 王雅萍
• Other Authors: Ho, Li-Hsing
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/42312680608479773331

博士 === 中華大學 === 科技管理博士學位學程 === 101 === Humor plays a crucial role in the workplace communication. Even though leaders might not consider humorous leadership as an essential condition for company’s success, it is important for building an effectively performing team. Participants of the study included 955 employees in Taiwan. Taking the perspective of employees, the study explored the relationship and moderating effect that types of humor used by the leaders and department heads in the organizations have with and on leader-member exchange relationship quality and job performance. Further, multilevel approach was taken by using humor styles as contextual variables to investigate multilevel moderated mediation of leaders’ humor styles, leader-member exchange relationship quality and job performance. First, results of the study showed that the sole use of affiliative humor might reduce members’ performance. However, it can – regardless of whether leaders use affiliative humor extensively or little – also work as a lubricant that moderates the relationship between leader-member exchange relationship quality and job performance and increases job performance. At the same time, the higher relationship quality is, the better employees’ job performance gets if leaders can exhibit high degrees of affiliative humor. If not, employees’ job performance might be weakened. Next, results of the multilevel moderated mediation model showed that self-enhancing humor can directly increase members’ job performance as well as leader-member exchange relationship quality. Additionally, it can indirectly increase employees’ job performance causing leader-member exchange relationship quality to become a mediator. Aggressive humor became a mediator when leader-member exchange relationship had a negative moderating effect on employees’ job performance. Lastly, leaders and department heads in the organizations should apply self-enhancing humor often to face complex and changing competitive environment in the workplace. Besides, aggressive and self-defeating types of humor should be avoided in the communication with the organization members. At the right time and place, affiliative humor can be used to smooth interactions in the organization. These findings and recommendations may serve the leaders as considerations how to apply humor.