Does Leader Humor Promote Employee Organizational Identification?: The Roles of Affect, Power Distance Orientation, and Abusive Supervision

In this study, we attempted to investigate the under-explored relationship between leader humor and employee organizational identification in the workplace. Drawing upon several views of humor including social exchange perspective, we sought to answer several interesting questions: how does leader humor increase employee organizational identification? Under which conditions is leader humor more effective? First, focusing on the role of emotions in the workplace, we expect that leader humor will be positively associated with employee organizational identification, mediated by increased positive affect. Second, we focus on the contingent effect of leader humor on employee positive affect by arguing that the contextual factors might magnify or nullify the effects of leader humor. In other words, we examined whether leader humor might be ambivalent under certain circumstances. Using data from 192 respondents from different organizations, we tested our hypothesized moderated mediation model and found that positive affect mediates the relationship between leader humor and organizational identification. Furthermore, the results showed that power distance orientation moderated the relationship between humor and positive affect such that humor has stronger effects on positive affect when power distance orientation is lower. Finally, we found that leader humor and abusive supervision interact to influence employee positive affect. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are discussed.