Humor Styles in the Workplace – A Comparison between Western and Eastern Culture

• Main Author: 袁振凱
• Other Authors: LIN, YAO-NAN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2fx54u

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 國際創業與經營管理學程碩士在職專班 === 106 === The purpose of this paper is to explore the difference between Western and Eastern humor styles and how it could possibly affect the workplace. “Humor” refers to people that use amusing or interesting ways to express themselves in the social environment. On a global scale there are four main styles of humor used: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. It is proven that those that have a sense of humor are better at coping with stress and have healthier relationships. In this thesis, it was predicted that Western culture uses more aggressive humor more than Eastern culture. Mainly because Western culture is an individualistic society that is predominantly masculine it appears to be more likely to use aggressive humor style the most. However, the results indicated that Western Culture actually uses self-enhancing humor style the most. Generally Eastern style culture is as likely to engage in humor styles as much as people in Western culture.