“Why so serious?”. The role of interpersonal conflict management styles in affiliative humour

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to examine how affiliative humour, which can bedefined as a positive humour style focusing on enhancing connections, is associated with collaborating, compromising, and avoiding conflict management styles in organisations. Study design. An online survey was conducted following the convenience sampling method to test the proposed hypotheses. The sample consisted of 257 teachers working at public schools in Adana, who are master’s degree students in Adana Alparslan Turkes Science and Technology University, Turkey. Exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were conducted in line with the research goals. Findings. As a result, affiliative humour was found to be significantly correlated with compromising and collaborating. Nonetheless, avoiding was found to have no significant relationship with affiliative humour. Compromising was the only significant variable in the regression model, which explaineda limited variance in affiliative humour. Implications for practice. Managers may deliberately tend to “produce” humour to benefit from it in conflicting situations. Nonetheless, managerial control for theuse of humour does not guarantee the expected productivity. Therefore, employees may be advised to acknowledge the benefits of positive humour styles — in case of this study, affiliative humour — inmanaging interpersonal conflicts. Value of the results. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a limited number of studies exist focusing directly on the association between affiliative humour and interpersonal conflict. Hence, the results are considered to fill the gap in the literature by clarifying that compromisingis the only conflict management style that has a positive impact on affiliative humour.