The Impact Of Leader Humor On Team Effectiveness

As life becomes more stable and social environment becomes more harmonious,individuals pay more attention to mental needs.Nowadays,employees in organizations begin to pursue emotional and mental satisfaction and expect to work in a relaxing and enjoyable atmosphere.This trend puts leaders to a new challenge.Leader humor is considered an effective management tool.Previous studies have shown that leaders who adopt a humorous approach to management can give employees more positive emotional perceptions,create a comfortable atmosphere,and satisfy employees’ mental needs.However,existing leader humor studies have mainly focused on the impact on employee’s cognition,attitude,and behavior,all of which are at the individual level.Group-level study remains to be discovered.The role of leader humor in a team and how it works are questions that deserve further discussion.In addition,as one of the key drivers of current development,entrepreneurial companies are particularly affected by factors such as external environmental pressures and internal cooperation efficiency.There is a high demand for leaders to deliver effective information and direct employees’ behaviors.Whether leader humor can effectively help leaders in entrepreneurial team management is also worth discussing.In view of this,this study constructs a grouplevel model based on signaling theory to examine the impact of leader humor on communication and team effectiveness,and to discuss the moderating role of intrateam trust between communication and team effectiveness,taking entrepreneurial teams as an example.This study adopts literature research,questionnaires and statistical analysis.Statistical software such as SPSS and Mplus were applied to analyze data from 51 entrepreneurial teams,containing 51 leaders and 203 employees.The results of empirical study show that(1)Leader humor has a significant positive effect on communication.(2)Leader humor has an indirect positive effect on team effectiveness through communication.(3)Intra-team trust positively moderates the relationship between communication and team effectiveness,that is,the higher level of intra-team trust,the stronger positive effect between communication and team effectiveness;the lower level of intra-team trust,the weaker positive effect between communication and team effectiveness.Based on the findings,this study offers following management enlightenments:(1)Leaders need to recognize the value of humor in management.(2)Leaders need to communicate with their employees in a high-quality manner.(3)Creating a positive atmosphere of trust is beneficial to organization sustainable development.