Humor in Business

Over the last three decades, there has been a proliferation of studies on the use of humor in business, which has yielded many important insights. The findings of these studies highlight humor as a "serious business" that deserves a more prominent role in both the workplace and business communication. Humor is positively associated among others with leader-member exchange, psychological empowerment of employees, subordinates’ job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors, and work engagement. However, it also appears that humor is a double-edged sword, since it signals to employees the acceptability of norm violation at work, and especially aggressive humor is negatively related to subordinates ’psychological well-being and positively with social distance. In the same vein, while the use of humor in advertising creates positive attitudes towards the advertisement and brand, it can make particular target groups experience negative feelings such as inferiority.

Even though humor research has expanded significantly in the last decades, many theoretical and practical questions remain unanswered. Therefore, the aim of this Research Topic is to assemble current perspectives on the use of humor in the workplace, advertising, social media communications, sales negotiations, workplace training, and its role as a management tool, a coping strategy, and a leadership quality. For a holistic and comprehensive perspective, we welcome contributions from all business disciplines (e.g., management, strategy, marketing, sales, digital, and communications), fields, and sectors, as well as contributions from Western countries and other parts of the world.

This Research Topic will focus on all article types that put forward findings (but are not limited to) regarding studies on:

• Humor in advertising

• Comedic violence in advertising

• Humor perceptions of prankvertising

• The ethics of humor in advertising

• Humor in international advertising

• The role of humor in virality

• The role of humor on intrusiveness of online-video advertisements

• Humor and consumer engagement in social media

• Humor and health communication

• The effects of humor use by salespersons

• Humor in the workplace

• Humor as a management tool

• Humor and leadership

• Leaders’, managers’, supervisors’ humor styles

• Humor and group effectiveness

• The ethics of humor in business

• Humor and organizational creativity

• Humor and culture in organizations

• Humor as a coping strategy

• The role of fun in workplace training

• Negative effects of disparagement humor

• The use of humor in multinational corporations

• Humor and play at work