The Psychology of Humor at Work

A Psychological Perspective

Christopher Robert, Christopher Robert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317370772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This is the first book to look at the psychological processes that enable humor to affect people and teams in the workplace. It recognizes that humor plays many roles beyond making people feel happier and more productive, and acknowledges humor's potential darker side as well.

Bringing together a small but growing field of study, the book features chapters around core psychological topics such perception, creativity and stress, while also addressing organizational issues such as leadership, teamwork, and social networks. The collection concludes with chapters on the role of humor in recruitment processes, as well as how humor consultants work with organizations.

Each chapter in The Psychology of Humor at Work not only provides a comprehensive review of what is known in that area, but also considers future directions for research and practice. It will prove fascinating reading for students, practitioners and researchers in organizational psychology, HRM, and business and management.

1
HUMOR AT WORK

Often experienced, seldom studied

Christopher Robert

I have been talking about humor in the workplace for over a decade with friends, strangers, colleagues, reporters, and pretty much anybody who will listen. When I tell people that I study humor at work, they generally express surprise, curiosity, shock, and excitement. The typical response is “Really? (pause), Huh (far away look). That’s cool!” It’s a terrific conversation starter, with most people wanting to know things like “how do you study that?” and “what do you find?” People from all sorts of different backgrounds become engaged and excited about the topic.

Why does the topic of humor at work elicit such strong reactions? It is safe to say that everybody experiences humor at work, and that most people experience humor frequently and in a wide range of forms and work contexts. Moreover, those experiences are often laden with emotions, both positive and negative, which make the topic immediately salient and personally relevant. I suspect that the ubiquity of humor behavior in work contexts, in combination with its emotional relevance, result in people giving a lot of thought to humor at work, its complexities, and its impact on their lives.

Although most people recognize that humor can have some downsides when used as a vehicle for aggression or belittling others, the overwhelming majority of individuals perceive humor to be a fundamentally positive and important aspect of work life. My colleague Scott Seyrek and I recently asked about 100 working adults from the US to write a paragraph or two describing what humor at work means to them (see Chapter 10 where we discuss this study in more detail). Although the depth and intensity of their responses varied, they paint a remarkably consistent picture of humor at work as a deeply meaningful phenomenon. Below are some illustrative quotes:

Humor is essential to my sanity at work. I always tell people, if you can’t find humor in a situation, then life just isn’t worth living.

The importance of humor cannot be denied.

If not for the humor between us (co-workers), I would not return to this job.

Humor is essential to a well-rounded life.

Humor in the workplace is vital.

Humor is a necessity in life.

Humor is important for individuals not to take themselves too seriously.

Without humor life wouldn’t be the same. Without it you could easily fall into depression, anger, or even commit suicide.

It’s easier to trust someone and rely on them for help (and vice versa) when you feel like you know that person a little, and humor is a great way to at least develop working friendships.

I am significantly younger than the people I work with and so I find that humor can be a really powerful way of crossing the “bridge” of age.

If it weren’t for my co-workers and our shared sense of humor I would undoubtedly be bored out of my mind.

Humor at work is extremely important to me as I am coming from a former job where humor was not in the workplace.

Humor is very necessary to my day-to-day experiences at work.

Humor is completely key for me in most facets of my life, especially when it comes to working.

I believe that humor at work is essential for success in the workplace.

I work with children and they do make me laugh often. This is a part of the job that I love.

Humor at work is beneficial to everyone, as long as it is innocent fun.

Humor doesn’t play a big role in my current job, because we get reprimanded if we basically even have a two-minute conversation with a co-worker. It makes the day really dull and long. Not being able to be light-hearted at work makes me feel like we are all being watched all the time and we’ll get an email or phone call from one of the managers just for asking how someone’s day is. It makes it really depressing. I feel like everyone just kind of goes into their own cubicle and shuts themselves off from everyone else because that’s the only way to get by. I hate that.

In stark contrast to the last quote, in which the individual laments the fact that management has basically prohibited social interaction, and humor in particular, one individual expressed an entirely different perspective:

I really don’t think humor is too important in the work place, at least for me. My goal in most working situations is to get the job done and make money, the personalities and sense of humor of my co-workers or supervisors don’t mean much to me. However, it is nice when they do have a sense of humor, because it makes the work less boring and more entertaining, which I suppose is beneficial to unmotivated workers. At my previous job, the type of humor my co-workers enjoyed was often offensive and led me to eventually quit and move to a new job.

Although this was certainly a valid and well-considered response, the existence of such a starkly different perspective on humor actually reinforces the near universality of a positive perception of workplace humor. Indeed, the frequent use of descriptors for workplace humor such as “necessary,” “beneficial,” “key,” “essential,” “vital,” and “powerful” help serve to illustrate that people perceive humor to be an indispensable feature of a healthy and positive workplace.

Given the strength and depth of peoples’ feelings about workplace humor, it seems ironic that humor has received very little attention in the research literature as a fundamental psychological process in workplace contexts. In his comprehensive volume on the psychology of humor, Rod Martin (2007, p. 361) noted that “very little psychological research of any kind has been conducted on the general topic of humor in the workplace.” In the ten-or-so years since the publication of Martin’s book, with some important exceptions that will be discussed later (Robert & Seyrek, this volume), this has not changed much. In fact, in their recent meta-analysis on humor in the workplace, Mesmer-Magnus, Glew, and Viswesvaran (2012) were only able to identify 49 independent empirical studies that fit their search criteria to examine leader or subordinate humor and some correlates (e.g. job satisfaction).

For rough comparison purposes, consider the vast number of empirical studies that have been conducted on other topics in organizational psychology. A quick search for empirical articles in peer-reviewed journals in the Psyc Info database, cross-listed with the term “organization,” yielded 6,008 articles on job satisfaction, 5,424 articles on leadership, 20,433 articles on groups, 3,770 articles on stress, 1,043 articles on creativity, and 1,502 articles on emotion. In comparison there were only 95 articles on humor, which is similar in relative magnitude to sexual harassment (159), incivility (75), noise (67), and abusive supervision (61). Indeed, it might be possible to develop a good understanding of a literature of this size over margaritas on a ten-day beach vacation.

I am not trying to argue that any of these topics should not be extensively studied by researchers, or that topics such as noise and abusive supervision are unimportant. But I wonder, given that humor is such a ubiquitous human phenomenon, and that people have such strong reactions to humor at work, why so little love for humor in the organizational literature?

I suspect there are four reasons. First, I think there is a tendency to regard humor, almost by definition, as lacking seriousness, and thus unimportant. If one’s first instinct is to think about humor at work as merely “cracking a few jokes,” it is easy to regard it as fundamentally insignificant or irrelevant. But as I have argued elsewhere (Robert & Wilbanks, 2012), humor is likely to impact people at work through its many small and subtle effects that accumulate over time. Relatedly, as noted by Linstead (1985) and Martin (2007), because humor is such a common feature of our everyday lives and interpersonal interactions, people might assume that it is already well understood.

Second, humor is an extremely flexible and complex phenomenon. It hides in plain sight by being leveraged in so many different contexts, and taking on so many faces. Humor can be light-hearted or serious, silly or sophisticated, and blunt or subtle, and it can be used to soothe, anger, stimulate, calm, support, or belittle. For researchers, who generally prefer to isolate, define, and tightly operationalize the phenomena they wish to study, finding a place to start might feel daunting. By choosing to study it from one particular vantage point, researchers might believe they are failing to do the topic justice. How do we grab on to a phenomenon that seems to be simultaneously everywhere, but nowhere in particular?

Third, humor phenomena have not been well integrated into the organizational literature. Indeed, much of the empirical work that has been done on humor in the workplace comes from disciplines outside of the core organizational psychology and organizational behavior literature, such as communication, anthropology, sociology, and even medicine. On one hand, this creates a certain degree of richness that is valuable, particularly for understanding the breadth of humor phenomena. On the other hand, the use of methodological and theoretical paradigms that are unfamiliar to organizational researchers makes it more difficult for the findings to be easily integrated into the body of existing knowledge, and might make organizational researchers feel like humor is not a topic that they “own.”

Finally, I suspect that scholars have been hesitant to pursue the topic of humor in the workplace because it might be unclear exactly how humor might be effectively leveraged in workplace contexts. That is, assuming that humor can have numerous positive impacts in the workplace, as most people assume, how do we inject, infuse, or inspire humor in order to benefit from those effects? Organizational scholarship has a long tradition of considering the applied potential of theories and research findings, but it might be difficult to generate practical advice that does not feel obvious. As I have noted elsewhere (Robert, Dunne, & Iun, 2015), the popular and practitioner literatures that address humor tend to take a straightforward perspective on workplace humor: the use of positively-toned or “nice” humor at work should be encouraged, but be mindful of “mean” humor and its destructive power. This conventional wisdom feels overly simplistic, and perhaps disconnected from the specific contexts in which humor is used.

This book is designed to help address these issues. I chose to organize this book around core organizational processes that are likely to be impacted by humor, and/or which have been addressed in the literature on humor in organizations. These include leadership, person perception, social networks, creativity, stress, groups and teams, and recruiting. The final two chapters take a somewhat broader view by examining the approaches that are taken within the relatively new field of humor consulting, and by discussing paradoxes that inhibit research attention to humor, humor theory, and the relationship between humor and culture.

The authors of the chapters are part of a small (but illustrious!) group of scholars with interests in humor in organizations, who have conducted research on humor in organizations, or who are willing to consider the role of humor in their subject area (e.g. Westaby and Echtenkamp’s examination of the role of humor within dynamic network theory, and da Motta Veiga’s examination of humor in recruiting). I was pleased and humbled to have these authors agree to my invitations to contribute chapters, because the value of this book is derived from their knowledge, expertise, creativity, and energy. You will find that each chapter not only provides a comprehensive review of what is currently known about each content area, they also offer insightful, and nuanced considerations of humor that have important implications for theory, research, and practice. To provide you with an overview of the book, below are some thoughts about each of the book’s remaining chapters.

Overview of chapters

In Chapter 2, Cooper addresses humor and leadership: a topic that has arguably received more attention in the small literature on humor in organizations than any other. Her chapter includes an in-depth analysis of qualitative data she collected through interviews with individuals employed in a wide variety of organizations. Building on these data, Cooper argues that leader-member exchange (LMX) theory provides a useful lens through which to view the social exchange of humor between leaders and their subordinates. Specifically, she argues that subordinates’ perceptions of the leader’s hedonic tone are the key drivers of leader humor’s effects, and that each subordinate might perceive the leader’s humor differently. Importantly, she develops the hedonic tone concept, and argues that a leader’s humor is not only interpreted based on whether it is positive or negative in general tone, but also in terms of whether it is spontaneously generated and relevant to work (rather than distracting). This perspective represents a valuable contribution to the literature, which has generally been leader-centric, and focused on the leader’s general use of humor or humor style (i.e. an “average leader perspective”), and on the simple “positive versus negative” humor dichotomy. Cooper’s framework suggests that leader humor and its impact is best thought of in terms of a dynamic interplay between leader, subordinate, context, and nuances of humor content, and that humor has an impact on organizations through its ongoing effects on the leader-subordinate relationship.

In Chapter 3, Finkelstein, Cerrentano, and Voyles explore humor’s seldom-examined role in person perception, and tackle a very fundamental question: How does an individual’s use of humor color the way we perceive that individual? By thoroughly reviewing both seminal and recent research on person-perception and integrating that work with their own research, the authors argue that a “halo of humor” is likely cast around individuals who use humor. The notion of a halo of humor suggests that people who use humor tend to be perceived more positively (at least when using positive humor styles), and that they exhibit a host of other positive traits. Clearly, the existence of a halo of humor has important ramifications for how we interact with individuals such as clients, customers, and vendors, and has implications for many workplace processes such as selection, performance appraisal, promotion, and compensation. This chapter also raises interesting theoretical and practical issues that are ripe for empirical examination. These include issues surrounding causality and directionality in the nature of humor in person perception (e.g. humorous and friendly are related traits, but are friendly people always humorous or vice versa?), the role of affect in humor’s impact on person-perception (i.e. does humor impact our perceptions of others because of the way it makes us feel?), and whether peoples’ beliefs in the fixed versus malleable nature of traits impact whether instances of humor impact perceptions of other related characteristics. Finally, one of the most interesting ideas raised by the authors concerns the impact of humor on metaperceptions: how does my use of humor impact what I think other people think of me, and thus my subsequent behavior?

In Chapter 4, Westaby and Echtenkamp examine the role of humor in organizational networks. Traditional network theory examines characteristics such as strong and weak ties between individuals, and the centrality of individuals within a network of relationships. This approach might suggest that humor is best conceptualized as an independent variable, and that positive humor strengthens network ties, whereas negative humor damages network ties. In contrast, the focus of this chapter is on the application of dynamic network theory (Westaby, 2012) to humor. Instead of focusing on the network itself, dynamic network theory focuses on individual goal striving (e.g. an individual’s motivation to use humor at work), and how supportive versus de-affirming network ties can either facilitate and support goal striving behavior, or work against that behavior. Moreover, the dynamic network theory approach suggests that humor behavior might cause a “rippling of emotions” back through the network, such that positive emotions are experienced directly or indirectly by individuals in a supportive role relative to the successful humorist’s goals, and negative emotions are experienced by individuals in de- affirming roles. In other words, the dynamic network perspective views humor as both affected by the network, and as affecting the network itself. The authors provide an extended example of how the dynamic network perspective might differ from a traditional social network perspective, emphasizing how various network roles might cause direct and indirect effects of humor. They also offer examples of how a dynamic network perspective might be valuable for examining humor’s role in a number of specific contexts (e.g. conflict management).

In Chapter 5, Eliav, Miron-Spektor, and Bear dig deeply into the relationship between humor and creativity. The authors provide an up-to-date and thorough review of the existing literature, which has demonstrated a correlation between humor use, or the sense of humor, and creativity. However, the most notable contribution of this chapter i...