Leader Humor Extends beyond Work: how and when Followers Have Better Family Lives

Abstract

Although the consequences of leader humor on subordinates have been well documented, the important issues of how and when leader humor affects employees’ attitudes or behaviors beyond the workplace have received limited attention. We integrate the humor literature with spillover-crossover theory to address the gap regarding the implications of leader humor in the nonwork domain. By performing an experiment and two field studies involving employee-spouse dyads, we consistently find 1) a positive association between leader humor and followers’ job satisfaction, 2) a spillover effect of followers’ job satisfaction on subordinates’ work-to-family enrichment (WFE) and a crossover effect of subordinates’ WFE on their spouses’ marital satisfaction, 3) serial mediating effects of followers’ job satisfaction and WFE on the leader humor-spouses’ marital satisfaction link, and 4) a stronger positive indirect effect of leader humor on spouse’ marital satisfaction via followers’ job satisfaction and WFE when followers’ perceived organizational interpersonal harmony is low. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and suggest practical implications for developing leader humor to enhance employee well-being.