Leader Humor And Employee Creativity

As economic globalization goes further,Chinese enterprises face unprecedented challenges of competition and quick-changing market environment.Unexpected events,from natural disasters and terrorist strikes to the lasting COVID-19 public crisis,and further to "black swan" and "grey rhino" incidents,put businesses into a more complicated,turbulent,and uncertain situation.In order that a business organization survives such an everchanging business environment,its leader,an agent who controls the core decision-making power and critical resources,shall play a crucial role in managing the challenges and development.Novel leadership theories like charismatic leadership and transformational leadership are widely attended,but it’s worth noting that leader humor is an effective approach to communication with employees,in which the leader pleases employees with interesting topics and thereby induces positive sentimental reactions.As a novel leadership behavior,leader humor plays social functions of breaking interpersonal communication barriers as an interpersonal catalytic,enhancing information sharing and exchange inside the organization.Therefore,our study focuses on the core subject of leader humor to construct a dynamic theoretic study model based on Chinese organizational situation to investigate the influence mechanism of leader humor.Whereas leader humor is important to enterprise management,scholars have probed into how and when leader humor influences organizational results.Studies on the influence mechanism of leader humor have gone into certain depth,but previous studies usually start from the leadership-centric theory and rarely consider how employees,as humor recipients,interpret the behavior of leader humor,particularly the motives underlying leader humor,which lead the employees to select their ways of behavior.Since studies on leader humor are at the early stage in China,there has been no studies on humor motive attribution.Therefore,this study fills in the vacancy by developing a leader humor motives attribution scale(LHMAS)and use the self-determination theory to deeply explore how different attribution of leader humor on the part of employees works in the dynamic influence process of leader humor.This paper intends to perform systematic and comprehensive study on the dynamic influence mechanism of leader humor from the following three perspectives.Firstly,identify the conceptual connotation and structural dimensions of leader humor motive attribution.In the study,the procedure of qualitative research like in-depth interview method was strictly followed so as to obtain fundamental materials of leader humor motive attribution.We categorized,coded,induced,and deduced the fundamental materials from interview to dig out and refine the conceptual connotation and structure of leader humor motive attribution.Secondly,develop a LHMAS.We followed the standard procedure of scale development and tested the scale reliability and validity consecutively by means of item purification(including T test,corrected item-total correlation test,and etc.),exploratory factor,confirmatory factor analysis,and thereby ensured the construct robustness.In scale development process,we released two rounds of questionnaires,the first round of250 questionnaires for initial item purification and the second round of 808 questionnaires for EFA and CFA.Thirdly,investigate the dynamic influence mechanism and boundary conditions of leader humor motive.This study focuses on how leader humor works on employee creativity through employee work passion and the underlying intervention mechanism.By use of experience sampling method(ESM),we performed morning and evening tracking research on259 employees in 10 consecutive working days.We incorporate intraindividual and interindividual differences into the theoretical model simultaneously to capture how the intraindividual harmonious work passion plays its mediating role in the dynamic process that leader humor influences employee creativity,and to explore the cross-layer regulatory effect of interindividual attribution difference among employees.The study has led to the following conclusions.Firstly,through steps of semi-structured interview,induction and deduction,and description of conceptual connotation,we group the leader humor motive attribution from employee perspective into three main categories,namely,guanxi enhancement motives,performance enhancement motives and impression manipulation motives.Secondly,through steps of scale pretesting,item purification,and etc.,we develop a LHMAS of three factors comprising 13 entries.Thirdly,from perspective of employee work passion,we construct and verify the dynamic influence mechanism that leader humor boosts employee creativity and confirm the mediating role of employee work passion in the relation between leader humor and employee creativity.Furthermore,when employees attribute leader humor to guanxi enhancement motives or performance enhancement motives,leader humor can produce stronger positive influence on employee creativity than other motives;however,such positive influence is compromised when employees attribute leader humor to impression manipulation motives.Our paper offers three specific contributions to the literature.First,by shining the spotlight on lens of employee attribution,the study develops LHMAS.From the perspective of a humor recipient—employee,the study explores the connotation and structure of leader humor motive attribution and thus develops LHMAS under the strict adherence to the qualitative research methodology paradigm.The development of such 3-dimension scale(i.e.,relationship improvement motive attribution,performance improvement motive attribution,and impression manipulation motive attribution)comprising 13 entries establishes a sound basis for future expended studies on leader humor.Second,the study broadens the existing pathway for leader humor’s downstream effects by shedding the light on its unique dynamic mechanism.Based on self-determination theory,the study castes harmonious work passion as a novel explanatory mediator to testify how leader humor prompts employee creativity.The rational model incorporated with both intraindividual and interindividual differences and empirical sampling method(ESM)utilized for high-frequency trace and investigation accurately interpret the dynamic mechanism of leader humor,which in turn boosts the advancement and maturation of ESM applied in research domains of leader humor.Third,in relation to humor motive attribution,the study uncovers a key boundary condition of leader humor regarding to its effectiveness.In our theoretical model,leader humor motive attribution is first introduced as a moderator in the transmission mechanism of “ leader humor—employee harmonious work passion—employee creativity”,which enriches the boundary conditions of leader humor to play a role.This is a high stake for thoroughly understanding "when" leader humor comes into work and for deeply burrowing into the continuingly studies on leader humor in the future.Briefly speaking,at theoretical level,this study addresses the core subject of leader humor,settles a series of fundamental issues including conceptual connotation,structure,and measuring of leader humor motive attribution,and verifies the dynamic influence mechanism that leader humor works on employee creativity and the boundary conditions of the influence.At practice level,the study can help enterprise managers to use humorous talks to stimulate harmonious employee work passion and thus enhance employee creativity.At the same time,leaders shall make use of humorous behavior appropriate to the work environment and leadership characteristics.Leader humor shall be embedded into day-to-day work as "true" expression aimed at better employee relation and performance,rather than a "pretended" admixture of show and impression manipulation.