Humor In The Workplace: A Literature Review

The inclination of an organization towards its human resources is a key task in survival, strategic success and efficient performance (Iveta, 2011), as the human resources singly known as the workers are fundamental, which goes in line with the African proverb as cited in (Tedam, 2013) which says A family (workers) is like a forest, when you are outside it is dense, when you are inside you see that each tree has its place. However, in line with Kristen (2011) an unsatisfied employee can only put much initial effort into work but will get bored and lose intrinsic motivation towards later work activities due to stress, poor fit between employee and job, perception, organizational performance lack of communication to mention a few.

But dissent

Most researchers shy away from its formality, productivity enhancement in the work place, and its relationship with emotional Labours of workers in varying institutions. While many other researchers (Gunn, 2002; Cousins, 1979, and Mahony, 2000) doubt the need for workplace humor. Therefore it becomes clear that there is little shared understanding as to the role of workplace humor on a formal phenomenon such as Organizational Emotional Labor which serves as a bane for the study at hand. And making it important to heed to Malone's (1980) call for thoughtful consideration of the effective and responsible use of

The first Identified Problem is that despite positive reception of employees towards Humor, Laugh and fun, it seems clear that employee attitude towards humor vary greatly and as such, Some employees see workplace humor as an avenue for release of their stress and motivation heightening while some employees contrarily have a negative view about workplace humor (Chan and Yu, 2010).

The second Fundamental problem of the study identified by scholars (Martin, 2001; Provine, 2000; Salovey et al., 2000) is the inability to sufficiently distinguish between Humor, Laughter and fun as they represent varying concepts entirely and could incur different managerial implications.

Following this is the intensifying competition has led many organisations to focus more attention on ‘customer care’ and to see the way in which services are delivered and the ‘attitude’ of their staff as key to customer satisfaction and competitive advantage to the detriment of employees as they are made to labour with little to no incentive for the services provided (Payne,