Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 7-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Impact of Leader Humor on Subordinate Job Satisfaction

The Impact of Leader Humor on Subordinate Job Satisfaction Conventional wisdom from the popular and scholarly literatures consistently suggests that positive humor by leaders can be beneficial, but that negative humor should be avoided at all costs. To explore the boundaries of that conventional wisdom, we draw on leadership and humor theory to develop and test a conceptual model describing the relationships between leader humor, leader–subordinate relationship quality, the subordinate’s tenure with the leader, and subordinate job satisfaction. Analysis of multilevel data from 241 subordinates nested within 70 leaders in 54 organizations revealed that the relationship between leader humor and job satisfaction was dependent on the quality of the leader–subordinate relationship, and not the positive/negative tone of the leader’s humor. Specifically, both positive and negative (i.e., affiliative and aggressive) leader humor styles were positively associated with job satisfaction when the relationship was positive, but both types were negatively associated with job satisfaction when the relationship was negative. Our results also suggested that the effects of positive humor increased with increasing subordinate tenure. We discuss the practical implications of these findings, including the importance of understanding the relational context of humor. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Group & Organization Management: An International Journal SAGE

The Impact of Leader Humor on Subordinate Job Satisfaction

Download PDF
32 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/the-impact-of-leader-humor-on-subordinate-job-satisfaction-Is8H0olty5

References (57)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2015
ISSN
1059-6011
eISSN
1552-3993
DOI
10.1177/1059601115598719
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Conventional wisdom from the popular and scholarly literatures consistently suggests that positive humor by leaders can be beneficial, but that negative humor should be avoided at all costs. To explore the boundaries of that conventional wisdom, we draw on leadership and humor theory to develop and test a conceptual model describing the relationships between leader humor, leader–subordinate relationship quality, the subordinate’s tenure with the leader, and subordinate job satisfaction. Analysis of multilevel data from 241 subordinates nested within 70 leaders in 54 organizations revealed that the relationship between leader humor and job satisfaction was dependent on the quality of the leader–subordinate relationship, and not the positive/negative tone of the leader’s humor. Specifically, both positive and negative (i.e., affiliative and aggressive) leader humor styles were positively associated with job satisfaction when the relationship was positive, but both types were negatively associated with job satisfaction when the relationship was negative. Our results also suggested that the effects of positive humor increased with increasing subordinate tenure. We discuss the practical implications of these findings, including the importance of understanding the relational context of humor.

Journal

Group & Organization Management: An International Journal – SAGE

Published: Jun 1, 2016

There are no references for this article.