BE HUMBLE IN VICTORY OR KICK IT WITH A SMILE? THE INFLUENCE OF EXECUTIVE HUMOR ON MEDIA APPROVAL OF ORGANIZATIONS

Title: BE HUMBLE IN VICTORY OR KICK IT WITH A SMILE? THE INFLUENCE OF EXECUTIVE HUMOR ON MEDIA APPROVAL OF ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract: We challenge recent theorizing about how executive humor—i.e., the degree to which an executive expresses humor in their externally oriented communication—influences media approval—i.e., the favorability of journalists’ affective coverage of an organization. Invoking affect-as-information theory, we propose that executive humor generally increases media approval. Humor research then leads us to argue that this relationship increases with poor organizational performance but shrinks the more that the humor involves malign incongruity. We test these hypotheses applying and adapting a novel machine learning approach to analyze humor in 4,500 press conferences held by head coaches of German Bundesliga soccer teams over five seasons and measuring media approval in 36,500 newspaper articles. Our results partially contradict our theorizing, as we observe that the humor-approval relationship is positive only when the organization performs poorly, while that relationship is negative on average and when performance is good. We do observe the predicted negative moderating effect of humor malignancy. Our study—including our abductive engagement with the empirical findlings—challenges the predominantly positive portrayal of executive humor and highlights the criticality of audiences’ emotional state and humor type in contextualizing the effects of executive humor. We also introduce a novel multimodal machine learning tool from affective computing to measure executive humor.