The Effect And Influence Mechanism Of Leader Humor On Newcomer Socialization

The Chinese word “humor” derives from the western context and is a common interpersonal interaction activity.However,although it is widely recognized that humor can bring people physical and mental pleasure as well as many other benefits,researches on humor by far still mainly focused on disciplines such as psychology,communication and sociology.With the intensification of social change and enterprise competition,the physical and mental health of enterprise employees are also under great pressure.In this context,the idea of employing leader humor as an effective managerial strategy came to the minds of many scholars in the field of organizational behavior.Some scholars had viewed leader humor as an effective tool for organizational management.Recently,especially in the face of lacking of humor in the workplace,which lead to the draught of energy and creativity in organizations,a study published in Harvard Business Review appealed that enterprises and managers should lead with humor.Although leader humor has received much attention from scholars in the past decades.However,studies on situations in which leader humor plays a positive role are still very limited,thus how to bring this effective tool into full play remains to be furtherly explored.Based on considerations above,this study will explore the effects of leader humor in the newcomer socialization context in China,especially the new employees nowadays are mainly “90s” and“95s”,which characterized by “self-ego,pay attention to the equality,disregard authority”,thus the traditional way of instilling or inculturating organizational culture into newcomers appeared out of date.Whereas the nature of leader humor make it a proper tool for socializing newcomers,but the positive role of leader humor for socializing new employees remained limited in extant researches.Based on the above considerations,the purpose of this study is to investigate the positive role of leader humor in the process of newcomer socialization,expecially its function on newcomers' proactivity and performance.At the same time,we reveal how leader humor stimulate newcomer proactivity through the perspective of self-identity,we also discussed individual power distance as a boundary condition of the effect of leader humor,finally this study also explored the mediation mechanism between newcomer proactivity and employee performance.Specifically,through a brief preliminary study,this study first explores the existing condition of leader humor in the newcomer socialization context.After answering this question,three subsequent studies explore the results of leader humor in the socializational process.Through the investigation of a three-stage sample,the first study explored that leader humor behaviors could stimulate newcomer proactive behaviors and further affect their task and creative performance.The second study collects data across four stages,and reveals that leader humor could promote aforementioned two kinds of newcomer proactivies by let newcomer authentically express themselves,at the same time,this study discusses newcomer power distance would have a impact on the effect between leader humor and newcomer authentic self-expression.Through another batch of four-stage matching data survey,the third study further discussed and verified that newcomer proactivities would influence on their work performance via role clarity,which is a proximal socializational outcome.In terms of research methods,our study first reviewed the current research status on leader humor as well as newcomer socialization through literature research,thus highlighting the theoretical and practical value of this study.Afterwards we combined qualitative and quantitative research to testify the theoretical model we proposed,the qualitative analysis aims to identify the accuracy of the related definitions through the test of some descriptions of texts,then a series of longitudinal data were collected,analytical tools such as structural equation model were also used to test our propositions.To draw a conclusion,this study will contribute to the literature of leadership humor,authentic self-expression,newcomer socilization.First,through exploring the direct influence of leader humor on new employees' proactivity and performance,this study broadens the positive role of leader humor in the newcomer socialization context.Scondly,from the perspective of newcomer self-identity,this study explores the black-box mechanism between leader humor and newomer's proactivity,at the same time enriches the cognitive path of leader humor on new employee's behaviors.Thirdly,this study explores newcomer's power distance as the influencing factor of the effect of leader humor,which enriches the boundary conditions of leader humor's influence on new employees.Finally,this study enriches the path mechanism between new employee proactivity and socializational outcomes.Through a series of empirical studies,we believe our study could provide insightful advices to help managers better cope with the newcomer socialization.We also provide organizations with more ways to motivate their new staffs,corresponding theoretical guidance and management enlightenment are offered for the enterprise management practice as how to achieve the smooth transition of the new generation of employees.