How can managerial humour act as a leverage mean towards employee engagement?

Details

Supervisors

Coeurderoy, Régis

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This dissertation explores the woefully untapped potential of managerial humour in creating a positive work environment that can promote employee engagement. Our premise is that managerial humour can effectively doing so via three mechanisms being: quality relationships with management and co-workers, the enhancement of employees’ psychological capital and the promotion of a humour-supportive culture. Overall, our findings suggest that managerial humour do coincide with quality relationships among organisational members across hierarchical levels and directly promotes employees’ psychological capital through stress release and coping effectiveness of negative emotions. Ultimately, our results were conclusive in that a humour-supportive culture promotes the creation of a positive work environment where employees feel fulfilled and energised, and in that such humour climate can support all three dimensions of engagement (cognitive, emotional, and physical). Interestingly, we also observed a positive correlation between the degree to which humour is encouraged and supported by management endeavours in an organisation and the levels of employee engagement in the latter.