Leader Humor and Employee Job Crafting: The Role of Employee-Perceived Organizational Support and Work Engagement.

Ling Tan,Wenjing Qian,Yongli Wang,Hailing Lu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.499849

Abstract

Research on the outcomes of leader humor has mainly focused on attitudinal or in-role behaviors, while proactive change-oriented behaviors have been neglected. Addressing these issues is important for scholars and practitioners to better understand how leader humor enables subordinates to behave proactively. By integrating the resource accumulation perspective and the motivational process of the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model, we frame leader humor as a socioemotional resource that can help employees to create other forms of resources, such as job resources (i.e., perceived organizational support). In turn, these job resources relate to employees’ motivations (i.e., work engagement) and behaviors (i.e., job crafting). We predict that leader humor is positively related to seeking resources and challenges and negatively associated with reducing demands through the serial mediating effects of followers’ perceived organizational support and work engagement. We test these hypotheses using an experimental design with a field sample in Study 1. Furthermore, we strengthen our hypotheses by replicating our results through a multiwave field study in Study 2. We consistently find: (1) a positive association between leader humor and followers’ perceived organizational support, (2) a positive link between followers’ perceived organizational support and work engagement, and (3) serial mediating effects of followers’ perceived organizational support and work engagement on the leader humor–job crafting link. The implications of the findings and future directions for research investigating leader humor and job crafting are discussed.

Highlights

Leader humor can strengthen followers’ job performance and mental health and improve organizational effectiveness
To further understand the downstream outcomes of job resources offered by leader humor, we focus on the motivational process of the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004; Schaufeli et al, 2009)
By integrating the resource accumulation perspective and the motivational process of the JD-R model, we propose a sequential mediation model that specifies why leader humor relates to job crafting via employeeperceived organizational support and work engagement

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Leader humor can strengthen followers’ job performance and mental health and improve organizational effectiveness (for meta-analyses, see Mesmer-magnus et al, 2012; Kong et al, 2019). Consistent with the motivational process perspective, our study investigates how leaders’ humorous behaviors enable individuals to gain job resources (i.e., perceived organizational support) at work and how these job resources in turn relate to high levels of employee work engagement, enabling employees to craft their jobs (Rich et al, 2010). By integrating a resource accumulation perspective with the JD-R model, we propose that leader humor facilitates employees’ acquisition of job resources (i.e., perceived organizational support) This outcome, subsequently leads to high levels of work engagement, motivating employees to engage in job crafting behaviors. We posit the following hypothesis with respect to the downstream effects of leader humor on employee job crafting behaviors: Hypothesis 4: Employee-perceived organizational support and work engagement mediate the effects of leader humor on employee job crafting in the form of seeking resources (4a), seeking challenges (4b), and reducing demands (4c).

Ethics Statement

DISCUSSION

Limitations and Future

Findings

ETHICS STATEMENT