Do I Have a Better Family Life When Working With a Humorous Leader? A Dual Pathway Investigation

Abstract

Managing positive employee work-family interface has been an essential responsibility for today’s leaders. Meanwhile, humor emerges as a popular and cost-effective leadership practice. Nevertheless, the impact of leader humor on employees’ family domain is largely unknown. Drawing upon work-family resources model, we propose that leader humor leads to information inadequacy, which is harmful to employee work-to-family enrichment on the one hand. On the other hand, it arouses employees’ positive affect, which is beneficial for their family pursuits. We further contend that quality information and affect resources exchanged with teammates (indicated by team-member exchange, TMX) would weaken the dual impact of leader humor on employee work-to-family enrichment. A three-wave data from 285 full-time working employees evidenced the information loss and positive affect gain pathways linking leader humor to employee work-to-family enrichment. TMX was found to buffer leader humor’s detrimental effect on information adequacy but not sway its beneficial effect on positive affect, which in turn facilitates employee work-to-family enrichment. Important theoretical and practical implications are provided regarding how organizations can capitalize on leader humor and encourage positive employee work-family interface.