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8692Humor is ubiquitous in the workplace. Since leaders are regarded as agents of organizations and hold power, leadership humor has an important impact on employees and organizations. Leadership humor, which is an important research branch in the field of humor and a hot topic in the field of leadership research, has received much attention from researchers at home and abroad in recent years. Based on reviewing the relevant literature on leadership humor at home and abroad, this paper finds the following conclusions: There are a large number of valuable research findings on leadership humor in western countries. The research has lagged behind in China. Leadership humor is defined from the perspectives of behavior and trait view. The differences exist between leadership aggressive humor and abusive supervision, leadership affiliative humor and inclusive leadership, leadership self-deprecating humor and leadership self-defeating humor. There are many structural dimensions and measurement scales of leadership humor. The confirmed factors which influence leadership humor are comparatively less, including employee affectivity, leader-member exchange, leaders’ gender, work performance and status. The factors that influence college students’ humor are not necessarily applicable to leaders. Leadership humor moderates the effects of transformational leadership, contingent reward leadership, laissez-faire leadership, abusive supervision, leader integrity and so on. According to the current research results, management implications of leadership humor research are proposed. Finally, based on the shortcomings of the existing research, this paper puts forward some research ideas in the future: strengthening the validation and development of measurement tools, enriching the influence factors of leadership humor, strengthening the influence result research of leadership humor, expanding the influence mechanism of leadership humor on outcome variables, perfecting the design of research methods, and promoting cross-cultural comparison research. The contributions of this paper are to grasp the context and the latest progress of leadership humor research, to clarify existing problems and possible research directions in the future, to provide a new theoretical perspective for explaining organizational behaviors in China, and to provide an important reference for promoting the research and practice of leadership humor in China.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
A Literature Review of Leadership Humor and Prospects
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 41, Issue 03, pp. 70 - 84 (2019) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2019.03.005
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Cite this article
Jing Baofeng, Zhou Xia. A Literature Review of Leadership Humor and Prospects[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2019, 41(3): 70-84.
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