Humor at the Workplace is Good for Performance

Humor, amusement, laughs. These words are normally associated with leisure and personal relationships, not to working for a company. Isn't business a serious matter, after all?

The traditional idea is that if you're having fun, you risk being distracted from work and having a negative effect on business performance. But is it really so? Given the importance of humor in private life, it's somewhat surprising there are very few studies on the role of humor in companies. As a doctoral project at the University of Bremen, I worked on a thesis titled "Humor in International Project Teams". When NASA accepted me as a speaker at the annual conference Project Management Challenge 2007, held nearby Houston, I understood that humor is a serious matter. What follows is a summary of the effects that humor can have within organizations.

In most situations, humor does no harm; actually, it does good. For instance, it has been found that leadership is not diminished by the recourse to humor, but actually strengthened by it. It is also clear that leaders able to extract high performance from their collaborators are usually endowed with good gifts for humor. More specifically, rather than just being amusing people, successful leaders allow and facilitate the development of settings for the expression of humor, improving the climate at the workplace and reducing stress.

Humor is a precious ally also in the management of conflicts. A message delivered with humor is usually less offensive and direct, while preserving its original meaning; it also distracts the attention from the conflict at hand, making it possible to see it under a different light. Humor is also effective in business negotiations: a business offer is more likely to be accepted if presented in a humorous way. Lastly, humor supports creativity and problem-solving skills, since it temporarily augments the ability of making unusual mental associations.

But the issue is not completely straightforward. It's been found for instance that humor tends to lower the perception of risk. And when a decision is really critical for the survival of an organization, hilarity is best left on the side. In international settings, humor should be used with greater care: certain issues could be taboo for certain cultures, and thus humor could lead to the opposite effects than those originally intended. Also, humor could be a symptom of organizational ill-being: it's often been noted how it is used for self-defense against difficult and stressful situations, in order to restore psychological balance and confidence. Humor at the workplace could thus be a reaction to organizational tensions and contradictions.

Summing up, it is time to introduce humor among the tools of management and manage it in a scientific way: not a romantic perspective, but one that will allow us to understand a fundamental aspect of our private and social lives.