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

In light of prior findings relating humor to gender differences, it seems possible that each gender will be less appreciative of the humor of a leader who is of the opposite gender (Decker and Rotondo, 2001). An important social dynamic that may contribute to same-gender pairings reporting higher levels of humor is the likelihood that both genders (across a wide range of work contexts) engage in greater levels of self-disclosure within their own gender. That is to say, members of a given gender may trade certain humorous comments and observations within their own social circle that they would not exchange with members of the opposite gender (Dindia and Allen, 1992; Lampert and Ervin-Tripp, 1998). In this instance, the nature of the topic of self-disclosure (humor) is likely to be one that is selectively deployed to promote rapport with others (Lampert and Ervin-Tripp, 2006). Stated in dyadic relational terms, we can further predict that same-gender leader-follower pairs will, therefore, have higher reports of humor than different-gender pairs.

Hypothesis 4: Followers in same-gender leader-follower pairs report greater use of humor than followers in different-gender leader-follower pairs.

METHOD

Participants

Public high schools served as the research setting for the study of leaders and followers, with participants recruited from California public high schools. Leadership in public high schools was selected for study as there have been recent calls for greater research on understanding organizational dynamics in educational settings (cf. Academy of Management Journal Forum, 2005) and public schools are representative of the type of organization where leaders may need to rely on social levers to motivate followers (Barnett et al., 2001; Eden, 1998; Moye et al., 2005).

The central method of the present research consisted of distributing questionnaires to a random sample of California high school principals/ leaders and a teacher/follower within each principal's school. Starting randomly, every "nth" high school, as listed in the State of California Public School Directory (Education, 2001), was selected as a target site. This technique was used to develop a random sample of high schools possessing representative principal-teacher pairs or dyads.

The questionnaire items were developed on the assumption that the principal is the central leadership figure within the school and the individual with the greatest responsibility for heading the school's organization with respect to the effective delivery of traditional departmental curricular content. The questionnaires were initially piloted with a sample of eight school system administrators, principals, and teachers. The principal's questionnaire was designed to focus on the performance of the departmental "lead" teachers. The five departmental areas of English, History, Mathematics, Physical Education, and Science were listed in the principal's survey as separate columns, and questions were designed to solicit independent assessments of each department's "lead" (i.e., area coordinator) teacher. Extensive comparisons of the survey results and response rates by teacher functional area (via chi-square and t-tests) did not reveal significant differences. Similarly, organizational attributes (such as student-body demographic composition and academic achievement scores) of non-responding principals and responding principals did not differ significantly, nor did participating institutions differ significantly in terms of their attributes relative to statewide averages. Further, principals' performance evaluations of nonresponding teachers did not differ from the performance evaluations of responding teachers.