Colloquium: Jamie Gloor - University of Zurich

Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Time: 13:30

Location: 5419.0105 (Kapteynborg)

Title: "Leaders laughing never keep their power together? A top-down, behavioral approach to humor" 

Abstract:

Jamie L. Gloor, PhD1
Research Fellow
University of Zurich
Jamie.Gloor business.uzh.ch

Petra Schmid, PhD
Assistant Professor
ETH Zurich
PetraSchmid ethz.ch

Kai Chi (Sam) Yam, PhD
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore
bizykc nus.edu.sg

Humor and laughter are ubiquitous at work, predicting a wide range of outcomes such as improved impressions and better leader-follower relationships. Because leaders guide followers’ sensemaking processes, they also set the tone for expressions of and reactions to humor at work. But given its pervasiveness and positive effects, why would a leader react in a way to extinguish it? By integrating the literatures on humor, leadership, and power, we first conceptualize DARE–Deadpan or Aggressive Responses to Extinguish others’ humor–a collection of behaviors motivated to maintain power through increasing social distance and reducing others’ humor attempts. We further propose that subordinates’ humor triggers leaders’ DAREs in less stable hierarchies and among leaders with higher dominance motivation, because these factors increase the odds that leaders view subordinates’ humor as power threats. We test these propositions with a series of pre-registered behavioral experiments. This research extends emerging work on the “dark side” of humor in organizations, integrating leadership and power theories to predict leaders’ negative reactions to their subordinates’ humor.