Summary
The use of humor by leaders is widely believed to have a beneficial impact on workplace outcomes. The present study, however, goes beyond a simple search for main-effect associations to test for the potential interactive role of leader humor in influencing the relationships between leader behavior and follower outcomes. For 179 leader-follower pairs sampled from public high schools, survey data were collected from teachers who described their principal's use of humor and degree to which the principal behaved with integrity, as well as used contingent personal reward. Moderated regression analysis revealed a significant interaction for leader use of humor and other dimensions of leader behavior in determining follower performance. In general, these results underscore a perspective wherein the impact of a leader's use of humor also depends on how a follower assesses other aspects of a leader's behavior.
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Extract
The Influence of Leader Humor On Relationships Between Leader Behavior and Follower Outcomes*
Although it is widely suspected that a leader's use of humor can have an enhancing effect on follower performance, relatively little empirical evidence has been gathered that clearly substantiates this belief (Duncan, Smeltzer, and Leap, 1990). Generally, scholarship devoted to the topic of humor in the workplace has been suggestive of how humor might impact group climate or organizational culture (Collinson, 1988; Holmes and Marra, 2002; Linstead, 1985; Lundberg, 1969; Robinson and Smith-Lovin, 2001) or build unit cohesion (Lennox-Terrion and Ashforth, 2002). In his early article, Malone (1980) argued that humor may contribute to enhancing both employee satisfaction and performance. Duncan (1982) linked humor to stimulating better communications as well as group cohesiveness, and linked these variables to better individual performance. In a later review of the literature on humor, Duncan et al. (1990) pointed to social psychological evidence of performance effects due to humor, as well as possible gender differences in response to humor. Additionally, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) provided support for the proposition that humor may stimulate creative thinking and innovation, while Ziv (1976) demonstrated that exposure to humor can enhance creativity in a laboratory setting. More recently, Cooper (2005) suggested that humor can be a type of ingratiatory behavior that can induce a favorable mood. In her conceptual framework for understanding humor as a form of ingratiation, Cooper linked humor to employee effectiveness. Christopher and Yan (2005), in a discussion of organizational culture, suggested that humor can also help to build interpersonal work relationships and, thereby, impact larger organizational outcomes. From a broader perspective, evidence reported by Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, and Staw (2005), George (1990, 1995), and Isen, Daubman, and Nowicki (1987) indicates that positive affect and mood are related to creativity and performance in a direct, linear fashio...
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