Something for the weekend: Some people may have experienced their boss going overboard with puns and jokes, in a similar vein to The Office’s David Brent, but not everyone appreciates this.
A study has revealed that poor attempts at humour from senior members of staff can actually affect job satisfaction, and not in a good way. Titled Faking it with the boss’s jokes? Leader humor quantity, follower surface acting, and power distance, this was conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
In their first study, the researchers teamed up 88 managers and employees for a week. One group of managers was told to improve interactions between leaders and followers, while the other group was asked to use humour with employees.
At the end of the week, employees in the latter group reported exhaustion, dissatisfaction with their jobs, and higher rates of surface acting, where they pretended to find their boss funny to keep up morale.
Meanwhile, a second study followed 212 participants at a US business school. They were part of a series of focus groups at a campus bookstore and divided into high and low-humour manager groups.
The groups had two kinds of leaders: one with formal attire and a more authoritative tone, and the other who dressed casually and used his first name. Participants in the high humour groups reported feeling more exhausted and less satisfied, while their negative feelings increased when paired with the more authoritative boss.
This highlighted that the wider the gap in power difference between a boss and employees grows, the more likely it is that excessive jokes will drain workers’ emotional energy and reduce job satisfaction.
The researchers stated: “Our findings challenge the assumption that leader humour is always a good thing. When used too frequently, especially when followers hold high power distance values, it can backfire. Instead, our results suggest that leaders should focus on fewer, higher-impact humour expressions. Less, in this case, might truly be more.”
We’ll make sure to keep excessive jokes and puns to ourselves here at Employee Benefits!
