Humor and morality in organizations.

Successful leaders often use humor to motivate, inspire, and lead. Yet, recent research suggests that the use of humor is risky for leaders. Our review suggests that humor must be morally offensive to some people for it to be perceived as funny. This inherent tension between humor and morality implies that the use of humor can sometimes act as a signal of acceptable moral standards in organizations, where a leader's use of humor carries significant risks because of the norm-violating message it sends to subordinates, or it can even be dangerous in extreme cases. We conclude the paper by offering future research directions on the study of workplace humor.

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Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.