Based on the discussions of data analysis, this chapter puts forward conclusions, research implications, practical implications, research limitation, and future suggestions.
Conclusions
The particular study was to examine whether perceived leaders’ humor behavior would influence pleasant climate, and also explore how the moderating effect of social conformity would influence the relationship between perceived leaders’ humor behavior and pleasant climate. A total number of 448 valid questionnaires were received from various workplaces. One in common was that all employee respondents have two or above colleagues and one most familiar leader. However, as the research exploring the employees’
perspectives and social phenomenon (i.e. social conformity) on psychological humor climate, unexpected outcomes surfaced under Taiwanese workplace context.
The reliability and validity result exposed a dichotomy of perceived leader humor behavior. This evidence subverts the authoritative classification of four humor style by Martin et al. (2003). Self-defeating leader humor style did not stand out as an adverse leading behavior, but rather was grouped together with affiliative and self-enhancing leader humor styles. This finding supported the literature that self-defeating humor is not a negative representative humor behavior in collectivism, such as Taiwan and the East Asia (Chan et al., 2011; Ünal, 2014). It performs as the same with affiliative and self-enhancing leader humor styles. It can be proposed that Taiwanese employees consider leader humor either beneficial or not useful to the workplace. Or maybe the outcomes exposed that Taiwanese has different cognition in the four humor styles. Thus, the western measurement of self-defeating, self-enhancing, and affiliative humor styles fail to distinguish each other in the Taiwanese context. Besides, “Jovial” leader humor style was created as a new term describing the friendly, self-amusement, and self-disapproving characteristics in this
research. So, the initial hypotheses and framework were reorganized due to the accuracy of representing the research assumptions. Aggressive and jovial were two representative leader humor styles. Still, the pleasant climate was the desired outcome and social conformity was the moderator.
The hierarchical regression results responded to the abovementioned inquiries.
Taiwanese employees perceived the two specified leader humor style, Jovial and Aggressive, to have significant influence on Pleasant Climate, one being strongly positive and the other strongly negative. However, the negative effect of Aggressive Leader Humor Style on Pleasant Climate becomes small to none existence when it was placed in the same context with Jovial Leader Humor Style. Briefly, the result suggests that from employees’
perspective, Jovial Leader Humor Style benefits followers to possess higher perceptions of Pleasant Climate at the workplace. Leaders who exhibit more Aggressive Leader Humor Style damage the Pleasant Climate. When both Jovial Leader Humor Style and Aggressive Leader Humor Style are shown in the workplace, only Jovial Leader Humor Style maintains its strong positive effect on employees’ perception of a Pleasant Climate. Therefore, it is important for leaders and organizational facilitators to realize what jovial leader humor style means for employees when they engage to develop a likeable humorous working atmosphere. Finally, the moderate R square in the overall regression model suggests that there are other important factors that may produce a Pleasant Climate more than the influences of leader humor styles and social conformity in current Taiwanese workplace.
The research questions are answered as follows. Firstly, employees’ perception of leaders’ humor behavior influences the pleasant climate. But the effect is partial. Briefly, it cautioned that leader humor behavior contributes not that much to a pleasant climate.
Taiwanese employees care about other elements more when they stay in a likable humorous work climate. Secondly, social conformity failed to play as a moderator of social influence
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between perceived leader humor styles and pleasant climate. Rather, the result showed that social conformity has more a direct influence on pleasant climate. Briefly, social conformity is more suitable as a predictor than a moderator. It indicates that employees with higher nature of conforming with others are more optimistic about the pleasant climate at their workplaces.
Research Implications
Summarizing the literature review, it was found that researchers have consented that humor is valuable in fostering a benign organizational climate. However, empirical research is still in an initial stage. Few empirical evidences support the relevant influences in a workplace. Additionally, very little research investigated the workplace humor under Taiwanese culture. Thus, this study adopted one of the two workplace humor climate scales to explore how employees assess their workplace humor climate. Moreover, the research contributed to discussing the common topic – leader humor behaviors from the “receiver”
role in capturing a more complete employees’ perception.
As the research did not find social conformity as a moderator but rather a predictor.
This outcome still contributes some understanding of social influences in humorous interpersonal interaction. It differed from studies that focus on the effect of leader-member exchange, which has been popularly studied. Natural tendency of conformity was evaluated.
However, this measurement may be insufficient to outline employees’ real “induced” level of social conformity under humorous occasions. The current research discussed the social conformity effect in employees in the most relaxed condition, which is very different from other research settings.
Moreover, the research found that younger Taiwanese employees reported higher social conformity and better pleasant climate. It provides evidence that shows younger employees are more likely to comply with the majority. Also, they appreciate more the
interpersonal humor at the workplace. Pasupathi (1999) argued that contrary to the younger, the older tends to confidently and rationally deal with the conformity pressure, and this age difference is more obvious in emotional stimuli. Ko, Yeh and Yang (2017) supported that leader humor in Taiwan is utilized as an emotional-affection of communicative skill, especially for Y generation. So, perceiving less awareness of status and possessing less professional experiences may be the reasons that cause younger employees to have higher social conformity. Additionally, nowadays employees desire not only a satisfaction of job achievements but also the pleasant working environment. Even in Taiwanese workplace, this finding corresponds with global consensus that humor climate is to be expected.
Practical Implications
The findings of this research would benefit the engagement of talent retention. First, it provides an understanding of humor effect at Taiwanese local workplaces. Quantitative design helped to connect great amount of workforce to sketch out how employees identify the performance of their leaders’ humor behavior and how employees accept the environment embodied the humorous interactions. As global trend, this study confirmed the possibilities for local organizations to utilize humor as a leadership behavior and establish humor as one benign organizational climate. When employees’ needs of leaders’
support, recognition, and better colleagueship are satisfied, a happy working environment may be improved.
In Taiwan, employees deem leaders to have two opposite leader humor styles, jovial and aggressive. Current research argued that humorous leadership is not the core dominant factor but it still does influence employee’s perception of a pleasant climate. The effect is more obvious for younger or lower tenured employees. Moreover, the research analysis uncovered that reducing aggressive leader humor style may promote employees’ perception of humor climate. Ko, Yeh and Yang (2017) found that the Taiwanese believe that
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detrimental humor cannot really count as a type of humor. It is more like an offensive behavior, equaling to a serious attack at the workplace. So, current research proposed that jovial leader humor styles are potentially a present and future welcoming leadership conduct. The effect of leader’s humor on a pleasant climate is expected to be easily observed when Taiwanese GenY occupies the core and active workforce in a local organization.
Limitations
Widespread collection was examined for the purpose to capture the workplace humor climate under Taiwanese culture. However, this research was unable to discuss the outcomes of pleasant climate. That is, it was unknown what was benefited from a benign humor climate at respondents’ workplace, especially when research on workplace humor area stresses a location-based difference. It is hard to infer the reasons behind this research finding from summarizing the previous literature. Also, empirical evidence related to humor climate and its instrument have waited for researchers to confirm due to it is just proposed as a new research trend.
Next, the instrument of testing social conformity was inadequate in representing employees’ “induced” degree of compliance. Particularly, it is unknown the extent of conformance when the respondent confronts those real pressured situations such as leader’s humor and workplace humor events, especially when performance of humor events and leader humor vary in leaders and workplace contexts. Also, Taiwanese usually overlooks the humorous moments (Yue, 2010). Therefore, it is difficult and complex to set up general situations to test this personal characteristic, especially when workplace humor is still under-investigated in Taiwan.
Future Research Suggestions
Through the discussion, it is proposed that humor climate can be an affective event.
Factors such as emotional dissemination, mutual relationship, and status privilege may influence employee interaction in the humor climate at their unit. Also, the norm of performing in the formal and informal situations can be another influencer when an employee conform order seriously (Ko, Yeh, & Yang, 2017). Although this research affirmed that younger employees appreciate more of pleasant climate.
Secondly, research analysis exposed that age and work nature positively affect employees’ perception of a pleasant climate. The researcher proposed that generations may have diffident score on pleasant climate. This finding may add value to organizational commitment or work engagement study. Work nature may influence departments own different degree of welcoming humor climate in one company, especially discussing workplace humor as an interpersonal interaction product.
Third, literature has manifested that inclusion in an organizational climate depends on what a researcher or an organization defines. Different to this research which directly investigated people’s humorous interaction in the workplace, future researchers can include the influence from ingroup/outgroup difference, supervisor support, and organizational encouragement. Applying the Humor Climate Scale (HCS; Cann et al., 2010) to explore how negative and positive humor work are supported in the workplace is suggested.
Another suggestion is to adopt the Taiwan version of Litwin and Stringer's Organizational Climate Scales (OCS; Hsu, 1972) to investigate how humor link between pleasant climate and work attitude, motivation and performance etc. It lists nine interdependent facets that employees care about at work, including structural restriction, reward, risk allowed, warmth, weight of performance and standard, conflict allowed, freedom at work, upper support, and identify.
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Lastly, lots of social research on social conformity conducted in series of predominated experiment. It is possible for researchers to receive employees’ extent of change when the researcher has more understanding about certain workplace and its humor application, so as to utilize the humorous events as the situation setting to pre- and post- test the employees’ conforming transformation.
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