According to Wharton research, a sense of humor,
when deftly and appropriately used, can enhance workplace status and perception
of one’s competence. That’s one of the findings of the research paper, “Risky
Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status,” by Maurice
Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations,
information and decisions; doctoral candidate Brad Bitterly, and Alison Wood
Brooks, a Harvard University assistant professor.
The research
was on the relationship between humor and status. Humor pervades our daily
interactions, yet it’s been largely ignored by the prior organizational
research. They discovered that the successful use
of humor signals confidence and competence, which in turn increases the joke
teller’s status. But what can backfire is the use of inappropriate jokes or
becoming the ‘class clown.’ “Although signaling confidence typically increases
status, telling inappropriate jokes signals low competence and the combined
effect of high confidence and low competence harms status,” the paper said.
When we
look around, we see some examples of humor going really well and it causes us
to perceive the joke teller as more confident, competent and higher in status.
For example, the night before Dick Costolo joined Twitter as the chief
operating officer, he sent out a tweet that said, “First full day as Twitter
COO tomorrow. Step one, undermine CEO, consolidate power.” A year after he sent
out that tweet, he ended up becoming CEO of Twitter. So we can see examples of
where someone uses humor and they rise to the top of the hierarchy, but we also
see cases where people attempt to use, say a really inappropriate joke, and
just plummet to the bottom. And the focus of our work is trying to understand
what it is about humor that can cause someone to either rise or fall in status.
Humor
is risky. Humor can signal competence and confidence and increase our status.
But sometimes humor can fail because it’s inappropriate, because it’s just not
very funny or because we overdo it. In those cases, we signal low competence
and that harms our status. And in some cases we’ve seen people get fired
because of it.
What we
find is that whether or not the humor goes well, the use of humor, the attempted
use, always signals confidence. I’m a confident person, I’m telling a joke. But
the competence, how competent I am, really matters. And that’s what swings the
use of humor from being effective or ineffective.
Since
it is a really important skill set in our daily lives and a really important
managerial skill, I think it could help for people to try to take classes. They
could do improve classes that could get them more familiar, more comfortable
with delivering a joke. I think part of the difficulty to begin with is just
trying to get that confidence — that way, you feel comfortable delivering it,
even an appropriate joke.
It’s
also something we can look for in selection. So when you screen people, we
might look for somebody that is at least comfortable with humor. Again, we
don’t want the class clown, but for somebody who’s facile with it, it can
really be a strategic advantage.
One of
the conclusions that the researchers found particularly surprising was that
they found that someone who effectively used humor, they were not only
perceived to be more confident, competent and higher in status, they were even
more likely to be elected as a group leader for a subsequent task. So here we
see humor not only influencing perceptions of one another, but even influencing
behavior.
The
area where we set ourselves apart is that we demonstrate that although
confidence really does help us in our lives — it’s really good to be confident
— saying an inappropriate joke is such a strong signal of lower intelligence
and lower skill, it overpowers any of the benefits of confidence and causes a
person to lose status.
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