| Leaders' aggressive humor has been an understudied workplace phenomenon despite being a common workplace occurrence. Little is known about leaders' aggressive humor or how this humor affects the workplace. As such, this study utilized the critical incidents technique to investigate leaders' aggressive humor and outcomes thereof, creating typologies for both the humor and the outcomes. One-hundred eighty-four employees provided behavioral descriptions of specific instances when their workplace leaders used humor and the outcomes of that humor. This yielded 430 aggressive humor incidents and 548 related outcomes. Eleven subject matter experts (SMEs) independently sorted 250 humor incidents, and 250 outcome incidents, into categories of their own choosing. Humor and outcome agreement matrices were created from these categorizations. These agreement matrices were subjected to principal components analyses, to derive sets of aggressive humor and outcome categories. Then, five separate SMEs independently resorted all incidents into the derived categories. This served to classify all incidents and test the categorical structure derived from the first sort. It was found that there were eight distinct types of leaders' aggressive humor in the workplace: Work Competence, Client/Customer Ridicule, Directly Personal, Ridicule Coworker, Stereotypes & Prejudice, Self-Deprecating, Sexual, and Organization Humor. It was also found that there were nine distinct types of outcomes: Improved Morale, Decreased Morale, Lose Respect for Supervisor, Decreased Work Behavior, Increased Work Behavior, Improved Relationship with Supervisor, Feels Uncomfortable, and Harm to Organization. The results of this study demonstrate that aggressive humor can be used to affect both beneficial and detrimental organizational ends, despite conventional wisdom that (a) humor, generally, is nearly always beneficial or (b) all aggressive humor should be avoided. However, leaders' aggressive humor is not as straight-forward as simply identifying good vs. bad humor as related to presumably beneficial or detrimental outcomes. While some types of leaders' aggressive humor were typically linked to deleterious (e.g., Sexual, Stereotypes & Prejudice) or beneficial (e.g., Self-Deprecating, Organization Humor) workplace outcomes, this was not the case for all types of leaders' aggressive humor. |
