Papers/Projects

Friend or Fiend? Disentangling Humor’s Effects on Hierarchies

Humor research in organizations focuses on leaders’ humor, but we know far less about followers’ humor. Here, we review and synthesize the scattered work on this “upward humor,” offering a novel framing of it as a strategy for followers to deal with hierarchies. We propose a continuum of upward humor from stabilizing (i.e., a friend who uses upward humor to reinforce hierarchies, make hierarchies more bearable or stable) to destabilizing (i.e., a fiend who uses upward humor to question or reshape existing hierarchies) depending on perceived intent (i.e., from benevolent to malicious, respectively) and outline key factors that shape these interpretations. We close with novel questions and methods for future research such as power plays, multi-modal data, and human-robot interactions. For the full-text publication in this special issue on workplace humor, click here.

Humor and its Effects for Leaders in the East and in the West

It is ever more important for the increasingly boundary-less leaders of global businesses to take caution when using humor in mixed cultural company or in an entirely different culture. Although humor is often touted as reliable tool for effective leadership, various cultural forces–three of which we review here–may meaningfully alter employees’ humor appreciation and the effects of leaders’ humor. Overall, humor can be an effective tool for a global leader if a leader possesses cultural intelligence and uses humor under the right contexts, with the right followers, and at the right time. For the full-text publication, click here.

Risqué Business? Humor in the Post-#MeToo Era 

#MeToo has undoubtedly triggered profound, positive effects for employees and organizations by increasing awareness of sexual harassment and empowering employees to speak up about it. However, it might have also created a backlash by making it more difficult for men and women to work with each other. Thus, we tested humor as a proactive, interpersonal intervention. In a series of experiments, results showed that a short, positive pun decreases intergroup anxiety for women, but increases it for men, when sexual harassment concerns are salient. Although this is the first study to our knowledge that reveals negative effects of positive humor for men, it seems that men's humor signals the very behaviors that trigger much of this post-#MeToo anxiety in the first place: flirtatious, promiscuous, and harassing behavior. Forthcoming in Journal of Applied Psychology.

Does it Pay to be Sarcastic?

Leaders often engage in costly, self-interested behaviors when they have the power and discretion to do so. Because followers are well-positioned to reduce these behaviors, I test how a specific follower communication—sarcasm expression—affects a particularly costly behavior: leader overpay. As expected, across 3 behavioral experiments, results show that follower sarcasm reduced leader overpay (vs. the control/no humor and vs. non-sarcastic humor), especially for leaders with weak moral identity, but the field study revealed that sarcasm only increased leader accountability when it was publicly (vs. privately) enacted. While talk is cheap, these results show that follower sarcasm can also be valuable, because it reduces leaders’ overpay by increasing accountability. Forthcoming in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The Funny Thing about Robot Leadership…

Is leadership exclusively human? What would the world look like if socially-skilled robots stepped into the roles normally reserved for humans? Can “soft skills” such as humor–often touted as exclusively human skills essential for the "future of work and leadership"–power robots' rise into leadership roles? We explore these questions–and more–in this new thought-piece.