The Moderating Role of Employees’ Humor Styles on the Relationship between Job Stress and Emotional Exhaustion

Zeynep Oktug

doi:10.5539/ibr.v10n4p131

Abstract

In today’s work conditions, job stress and emotional exhaustion are serious threats for the health of employees. Previous research suggests a relationship between job stress and emotional exhaustion. The way individuals use humor has been associated with different coping strategies. The aim of this study is to investigate the moderating role of employees’ humor styles on the relationship between job stress and emotional exhaustion. 116 participants completed self-reported measures assessing their job stress, emotional exhaustion and humor styles. For data analyses a series of hierarchical moderated regression analyses were conducted. The findings show that self-enhancing and self-defeating humor styles have moderating effects on the relationship between job stress and emotional exhaustion. As the level of self-enhancing humor increases, the effect of job stress on emotional exhaustion is attenuated, on the other hand, as the level of self-defeating humor increases, the effect of job stress on emotional exhaustion is intensified. Findings regarding the effects of employees’ humor styles are discussed.

Highlights

Humor is a double-edged sword, which can help in difficult situations to smooth things, and can hurt by offending people in another situation
According to the correlation analysis results, there is a positive relationship between job stress and emotional exhaustion (r=.43, p
The results of this study revealed that some types of humor styles have the potential to make some changes on the relationship between these two variables

Summary

Introduction

Humor is a double-edged sword, which can help in difficult situations to smooth things, and can hurt by offending people in another situation. Humor theories can be categorized under three topics: Incongruity, superiority and relief theories. Incongruity theories suggest that people laugh at contradictory things, which normally do not come together. Superiority theories suggest that people laugh at things, situations or people, over which they feel superior (Hobbes, 1968). On the other hand, suggest that people laugh at topics affecting areas in which they have bottled up feelings, like sex or aggression (Freud, 1960). More recent studies focus on people’s humorous styles rather than at what they laugh. Martin and friends (2003) distinguished between four different humor styles, namely, self-enhancing, affiliative, self-defeating and aggressive humor styles, which have different effects on what people experience

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