Influence of Meeting Humor Styles on Meeting Satisfaction

Drawing from theory on humor styles, impression management, and workplace meetings, we developed a video vignette followed by a survey to examine meeting satisfaction. We began by investigating whether there were differences in meeting satisfaction based on differences in the type of humor utilized. We then investigated how individual differences in impression management affects the perception of affiliative and aggressive humor. We found that there were a variety of statistically significant differences in t-test comparisons of humor conditions utilized. Differences in impression management were not associated with differences in meeting satisfaction in the affiliative or aggressive humor condition. One finding of this study was that affiliative humor tends to result in greater meeting satisfaction than aggressive humor. We offer implications and insights for practice, in terms of leveraging the benefits of humor for managing relationships at work