Does National Culture Matter? Restaurant Employees’ Workplace Humor and Job Embeddedness

Abstract

The ability to retain employees is a tenacious phenomenon in the restaurant workplace. Focusing on job embeddedness (JE) as possible explanatory factor in the application of the broaden-and-build theory and the social exchange theory, this study assesses the relationships among restaurant employees’ workplace humor, perceived workplace fun, perceived workplace aggression, and organizational JE (OJE). It examines to what extent these relationships vary across contexts, depending on national culture. A structural modeling analysis of data from 540 employees in restaurants in the United States and China provides broad support for our hypothesis: Workplace fun is positively associated with restaurant employees’ OJE while only coworker aggression is negatively related to employees’ OJE. Restaurant employees’ use of affiliative humor and aggressive humor is positively related to perceived workplace fun and negatively associated with perceived workplace aggression. Furthermore, national culture moderates the relationships between affiliative humor and perceived workplace aggression, aggressive humor and perceived workplace fun, as well as between workplace fun and OJE. Our findings contribute to clarifying the dynamics between perceptions of certain organizational factors for understanding when employees may develop OJE. The implication is that restaurant companies with international operations can foster OJE by placing various levels of emphasis on types of humor, workplace fun, and workplace aggression, in societies where individuals perceive these variables differently.