At the beginning of the Conflict Management and Negotiations classes last Fall MBA term at GWSB professor often had a short musical intermission with some comments, or a humorous YouTube video to set the positive tone for the lecture. At one point there was a brief comment about the humor and its effect on increasing workplace productivity. This lead me to think more about the role of humor in the workplace and its effect on improving the overall work atmosphere and increasing productivity.
I did some quick search on the topic and it appears that there is a body of scholarly research on the subject. There is empirical evidence on correlation between humor and creativity, work performance, and even employee retention. It is a well-established notion that humor creates positive emotions, but most of the time humor is relegated to personal entertainment domain.
I have long intuitively suspected that there is value in humor not only for personal entertainment, but also for educational purposes, see my posts: Macroeconomics Fun – Notes from the Classroom, My Favorite MBA Jokes, Macroeconomics – Funny Joke of the Day, as well as for work environment: MBA Joke – FedEx Commercial. These studies that I found during the search have mostly confirmed my intuitive guesses.
I think the organizational leaders need to systematically incorporate humor into their organizational culture, not just let happen it haphazardly. Some of the most envied companies in the USA have this culture engrained into their organizations. Immediate examples that come to mind would be Google and Facebook. They are some of the most creative companies and they are also known for their loose and somewhat goofy atmosphere. They drive their employees hard, but they also let them play hard. To me it appears that there is no coincidence there, and humor (positive emotions in general) goes hand in hand with work creativity and productivity.
There are also other examples of companies that drive their workers hard, but do not create the environment where the stress can be naturally diffused trough positive emotions, including the ones induced by humor. One such company that comes to mind is Zynga – online games developer. There has been a series of publications lately on the work environment where many employees are extremely unhappy with the company and are ready to leave it as soon as they get their stock options at the IPO. Not a very good recipe for continuous growth and work force retention in the world where creative technical talent is quite scarce and the competition is waiting to snatch them at any opportunity.
In my company in the future I will establish a 10-minute humor recess before the boring business meetings. Or maybe, I will replace those meetings with stand-up comedian competitions altogether. Just kidding
By the way, here is one of the videos we watched in the Conflict Management and Negotiations class. You can find more of them on youtube by searching for Terry Tate Office Linebacker. Get a good cheer, cancel the meeting ![]()
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