Cabaret stage in Passau's Scharfrichterhaus, where, amongst others, the behaviour of CEOs is sometimes satirised. Symbolic image: Uli Schwarz
That humour has an immense bearing on human interaction is well studied in psychology. It is therefore all the more surprising to find that hardly any research hardly any research has looked at how humour works in top management communication. This is where our study comes in, entitled “Good Fun or Laughingstock? How CEO Humor Affects Infomediaries’ Social Evaluations of Organizations,” published in the prestigious journal Academy of Management Review. In this study, we are developing a model that shows how the use of different types of humour by chief executive officers affects the way infomediaries such as journalists and analysts evaluate their companies.
Types of CEO humour and their impact
Based on previously conducted humour studies, we distinguish between four types of CEO humour. Two of them are positive:
Two types of CEO humour are negative:
Our key argument is that there are two central pathways through which CEO humour –depending on its type – affects social evaluations of organizations by infomediaries (e.g., journalists or analysts). First, CEO humour alters infomediaries’ state of mind, such as their mood or their perception of social closeness to the CEO. Second, CEO humour accommodates or violates deep-seated expectations of the general tasks and social functions of a CEO. The researchers argue that both forms of positive CEO humour arouse positive emotional states and accommodate CEO-role expectations. Thus, this CEO humour positively affects the way the company is perceived.
The effects of the negative types of CEO humour are especially intriguing, deviating from what we know about humour practiced by less senior leaders, and from what one would normatively desire. Practitioner-oriented literature typically recommends leaders to use self-defeating humour to create social closeness to followers. Such humour, which puts one’s own weakness in the spotlight, is also viewed favourably by society. Yet, self-defeating humour conflicts with central expectations as to the CEO’s role. In turn, CEOs engaging in this type of humour could negatively affect infomediaries’ evaluations. Even if we dislike it: The stock market and other audiences will likely punish CEOs who reveal weaknesses very often and put themselves down.
Aggressive CEO humour, in contrast, may pay for CEOs – even though it violates social norms, harms the CEO’s function as a role model, and disparages other people, at least when it comes to evaluations regarding a company’s competitiveness. The problem is that, regrettably, a sharp-elbow style of management continues to dominate in audiences’ minds. Thus – even though they may dislike a company and expect it to behave less appropriately when a CEO expresses aggressive humour – infomediaries likely expect CEOs who show assertiveness and dominance through aggressive humour to be better equipped to make their company stand out and win.
Let us be clear – we are in no way suggesting that CEOs should engage in aggressive humour. Rather, our intent is to explain why certain types of humour used by CEOs have a different effect than previously supposed.
Professor Andreas König holds the Chair of Strategic Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship and is deputy Spokesperson of DFG Research Training Group 2720 “Digital Platform Ecosystems” at the University of Passau. He studies discontinuous innovation and organisational change, strategic leadership, and executive communication, including in the context of the digital transformation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and crisis. Dr Benno Stöcklein is currently head of human resources at FUTRUE, an international healthcare group. Dr Dominik Bong is currently head of business improvement at Zalando.
Professor König collaborates with many internationally acclaimed top management scholars. These include Nathan J. Hiller, a management professor at Florida International University, and Cecily Cooper, a management professor at the University of Miami.
The study was initiated as part of a research project on humour among top executives, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and conducted by Professor König and Professor Björn Schuller (Technische Universität München (TUM) / Imperial College London) and Shahin Amiriparian (TUM). Besides doing conceptual work, the team develops ways to capture and gauge the humour used in top-executives’ external communication with the help of machine learning (algorithms). To do so, the team uses a many different sources, including press conferences held by football coaches in the Bundesliga and the Premier League.
