How Leader Humor Drives Employee Innovation
Research from Xinxiang Medical University and Capital Normal University, China on the effect of leader humor and team innovation
As a leader in a tech organization, you're likely always on the lookout for ways to boost innovation and engagement among your team members. A recent study out of China offers an intriguing insight - your sense of humor could be a powerful tool for driving employee creativity and innovative behavior.
The researchers wanted to understand if a leader's use of humor could actually make a difference in how innovative their team members are. They were particularly interested in understanding the underlying mechanisms at play and any factors that might amplify or dampen this effect.
The Study
To explore these questions, the researchers conducted surveys among 383 employees and their supervisors across several Chinese high-tech companies. Employees rated their supervisors' use of humor, their own work engagement, and how much they viewed their supervisor as embodying the organization.
A month later, supervisors evaluated their employees' innovative behaviors. They then analyzed how these factors impact innovative behavior.
What Did They Find?
The findings are compelling: humor from leaders positively influences employee innovation. Leader humor was indeed found to promote employee innovative behavior. But how exactly does cracking jokes lead to groundbreaking ideas?
This effect is partially mediated by work engagement, meaning that humor boosts engagement, which in turn enhances innovation.
The study also found that this effect is amplified when employees see their supervisor as truly representing the organization's values (termed "supervisor's organizational embodiment"). A quote from the paper:
Specifically, the above direct relationship between leader humor and work engagement is stronger in the employees with a higher level of supervisor’s organizational embodiment.
In other words, if your team sees you as walking the walk, your humor is more likely to inspire them to go the extra mile.
So, What Does This Mean For Leaders?
So …. Should you now sign up for the next available open mic event at your local comedy club? Probably not (unless you really want to, regardless of this study).
The research concluded that humor doesn’t directly fuel innovation - greater work engagement does. Humor helps employees feel more engaged at work, which can fuel innovation.
What this does mean, though, is that the role of leaders is more nuanced and subtle than what appears in most leadership books or courses. Leaders often set the tone and vibe of the workplace, or at least have an outsized influence in changing it.
Innovation often happens when employees are allowed to experiment, and as part of that, most of those experiments will not have super successful results. How do leaders react in those situations? That often can guide the quality of the experiments themselves, which, in turn, affects innovation.
This research also sheds some light on the kind of humor which works better. A leader who is using humor counter to the organizational values (for example, trashing the company or the CEO all the time) will not have the organizational embodiment that the paper suggests, is needed to drive innovation.
On the other hand, a leader who embodies the organization’s values (for example, finding humor in failed experiments, looking at the bright side via humor, encouraging employees via humor to lift morale, etc.) can have the required organizational embodiment, increasing work engagement in the right way, and drive innovation overall.
Driving innovation is a complex topic, with many different factors at play. This paper shed light on a factor very few others have approached as a research topic, but can be significant for leaders to consider.