The Influence Of Leader Humor On Employees’ Taking Charge Behavior

In this era of variability,uncertainty,complexity and ambiguity(VUCA),it is crucial to effectively improve the ability of enterprises to cope with external challenges.This requires that managers not only require employees to efficiently complete tasks within their roles,but also expect them to challenge the status quo and make more taking charge behavior to maintain the competitive advantage of the organization.Under the involution environment,leaders can only adopt some low-cost organizational change methods to guide employees to show more taking charge behaviors.Leader humor is a method that can actively guide employees to show taking charge behaviors and can be quickly applied to the organization.Therefore,this study introduces the concept of leader humor,explore the role and influence of such behavior factors on employees’ taking charge behavior.Based on the social information processing theory,this paper constructs a research model by combing the literature on leader humor,perceived insider status,emotional exhaustion,taking charge behavior and traditionality,discusses the impact of leader humor on employees’ taking charge behavior,and puts forward the mediating effects of perceived insider status and emotional exhaustion and the moderating effect of employees’ traditionality.Based on the questionnaire survey of 394 enterprise employees,SPSS23.0 and Mplus8.0 were used for reliability and validity analysis,correlation analysis,homology bias test and hypothesis test to verify the hypothesis proposed in the study.The following conclusions were obtained through analysis:Firstly,leader humor has a significant positive impact on employees’ taking charge behavior.Secondly,leader humor has a significant positive impact on employees’ perceived insider status.Moreover,perceived insider status has some mediating effects in the transmission path of leader humor and taking charge behavior.Thirdly,leader humor has a significant negative impact on employees’ emotional exhaustion,and emotional exhaustion has a partial mediating effect in the transmission path between leader humor and taking charge behavior.Finally,traditionality has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between leader humor and perceived insider status.Moreover,traditionality has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between leader humor and emotional exhaustion.These research conclusions have a certain enlightenment on management practice.Organizations should pay attention to cultivating leaders’ sense of humor,and leaders should also show more humorous behaviors as well as change their own inherent stereotypes about the relationship between leaders and employees,so as to enhance employees’ perceived insider status,reduce the possibility of emotional exhaustion,and stimulate employees to show more taking charge behaviors.Promote the competitiveness of organizations in the VUCA era.