Organizational humor as making our work more meaningful: mediation by crafting job resources

Abstract

In the present study, we examined the impact of humor’s positive functions on the perception of a job’s meaningfulness. We argued that liberating and stress-relieving humor act as job resources enhancing job crafting to increase social and structural resources to experience meaningfulness. We hypothesized that crafting the job to increase structural and social resources would mediate the link between organizational humor functions (i.e., liberating and stress-relieving) and meaningfulness. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 200 Turkish employees from different occupations. Our results revealed that increasing structural resources mediated the relationship between liberating humor and meaningfulness, while this mediation was partially for stress-relieving humor. The mediating role of increasing social resources was partial and conditional for both types of organizational humor functions. The practical and theoretical implications have been discussed from a positive organizational scholarship perspective.