The Funny Thing About Leadership

Humor as often been an overlooked and underutilized management tool. The relationship between leader humor expression and trust is explored herein through the theoretical foundations of social exchange theory and signaling theory. It is posited that leader humor expression leads to greater degrees of follower trust by means of perceptions of trustworthiness. Therefore, it is hypothesized that trustworthiness mediates the relationship between leader humor expression and trust. The individual relationships between leader humor expression and each of the trustworthiness factors (ability, benevolence, and integrity) are also analyzed. Furthermore, this study explores how the intentions behind a leader’s behavior via authentic leadership can influence follower’s perceptions of trustworthiness. The hypotheses are analyzed using both ordinary least squares regression and Hayes Process Macro. Hayes Process is used to analyze the mediation, moderation, and moderated meditation hypotheses. Results indicate that leader humor expression has a significant positive influence on each of the trustworthiness factors (ability, benevolence, and integrity), while also finding that both benevolence and integrity partially mediate the relationship between leader humor expression and trust. The contributions of these findings to both scholarly research and managerial applications are discussed herein.

Grantor dc:publisher

Creighton University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Ballor, Austin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Taylor, Regina

• Authentic Leadership
• Humor
• Trust
• Trusthworthiness

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is retained by the Author. A non-exclusive distribution right is granted to Creighton University and to ProQuest following the publishing model selected above.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://cdr.creighton.edu/handle/10504/153967

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:cdr.creighton.edu:10504/153967