The influence of leader humor on relationships between leader behavior and follower outcomes

Journal of Managerial Issues, Summer, 2009 by Robert P. Vecchio, Joseph E. Justin, Craig L. Pearce

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 fashion.

In one of the few empirical studies of the role of humor in a particular organizational setting, Avolio, Howell, and Sosik (1999) assessed the attitudes and behaviors of 115 managerial leaders and their 322 subordinates in a large financial institution. Specifically, these researchers asked followers to describe their manager's leadership behavior (on dimensions of transformational, contingent reward, and laissez-faire leadership) and use of tension-reducing humor. Analyses of the dependent measures of subordinate and work-unit performance revealed that humor had both a positive main-effect and a moderator-effect when considered in conjunction with subordinate descriptions of leader behavior. Specifically, they found that transformational leadership was more positively related to unit performance for leaders who made high use of humor (relative to low use), and that contingent reward leadership and laissez-faire leadership (contrary to their predictions) were more negatively related to performance (at both unit and individual levels) for leaders who made high use of humor (relative to low use).

It should perhaps be noted at this point that tension-reducing humor is also the focus of the present study. However, tension-reducing humor is only one of three major theoretical perspectives for understanding the role of humor: superiority, incongruity, and relief (or tension-reducing). Superiority theories of humor contend that humor originates in feelings of perceived superiority over another (Foot, 1986). Research on this form of humor has dealt with aggressive and disparaging aspects of humor. Incongruity theories focus on humor arising from the unanticipated discovery of an inconsistency (Berger, 1976). Relief theories, however, focus on laughter as providing a discharge for pent-up energy or tension (Berlyne, 1972; Giles et al., 1976).

The Question of Context

The import of this previous theory and research is that the use of humor by a leader can have a positive impact on follower job performance through a variety of social mechanisms. As noted above, humor can provide tension release and psychic reward, as well as relieve frustration and facilitate information transfer. It should also be noted that the above-cited research occurred in for-profit firms. Whether humor can be shown to be associated with employee performance outside of a for-profit organizational setting remains an open question, as the leadership role in public institutions presents unique challenges due to a relative lack of clear, simple measures of organizational performance and comparatively high employee entrenchment (Drake and Roe, 2003; Engel, 2004; Werther, 2004). In addition, Drucker (1990) and others (e.g., Connors, 2001; Engel, 2004; Finkelstein and Malen, 2004; Hallock, 2004; Hesselbein, 2004; Pearce et al., 2001; Riggio and Orr, 2004; Werther, 2004) make the point that educational leaders (and, more broadly, one may argue leaders in non-profit settings) have recourse to fewer extrinsic levers by which they can motivate employees (e.g., less control over financial incentives and less ease of terminating employment due to tenure arrangements). As a consequence, the use of humor may be one of the avenues through which an institutional leader can hope to reduce social tension and facilitate work effort. Quite possibly, humor may be relied on more readily as a social influence tactic in an educational setting, relative to other organizational settings, because interpersonal relations is one of the few influence mechanisms available to an educational administrator. Therefore, the use of humor may reveal stronger effects in an educational setting (vis-a-vis a for-profit setting). Alternatively, it may be otherwise true that the relative lack of motivational levers so weakens a leader in an educational setting that the use of humor has no measurable impact on performance. Nonetheless, by extending the prior published findings on humor within the for-profit sector to the educational arena, the following direct effect is posited: