Exploring the interplay between frontline employees’ humour styles in service encounters

ABSTRACTOne question that needs to be asked in understanding the consequences of humour in service encounters is whether the prevalent bivariate approaches capture the full range of humour consequences. Therefore, this study examines the influence of frontline employees’ (FLEs) combined use of affiliative and self-defeating humour on customers’ perceptions of service quality in 268 service encounters. Bivariate results show that the positive effect of affiliative humour is much stronger than the negative effect of self-defeating humour. On the contrary, response surface analyses show that bad may be stronger than good. FLEs’ humour use is particularly advantageous with customers who appreciate humour, while for those who do not, there is an optimal margin effect when affiliative humour exceeds self-defeating humour.KEYWORDS: Affiliative humourself-defeating humourperceived service qualityresponse surface analysisfrontline employees' (FLEs) AcknowledgmentsThe author wishes to thank Sandra dos Santos Amaral for her contribution at the data collection stage.Disclosure statementNo potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author.Notes1. Chiew et al. (Citation2019) operationalised other-directed humour with three affiliative humour items, and self-directed humour with three self-defeating items and one self-enhancing item – all items were adapted from Martin et al. (Citation2003).2. X1 and X2 refer to the affiliative humour and self-defeating humour variables, respectively.3. Level 2 refers to the participant level (between-person) and Level 1 to the observation level (within-person).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDB/04105/2020].Notes on contributorsEduardo OliveiraEduardo Oliveira is the current director of the Economics and HRM Master Course Director at University of Porto. He teaches organisational behaviour and HRM courses at the Faculty of Economics and at Porto Business School. His research focuses on ageing workforces, decision making, and humor in organisational settings.