Relationships Between Leader's Humor and Subordinate Perceptions of Leader Warmth and Competence: The Role of Relationship Harmony

We proposed that in a Chinese context, rather than in the U.S. context, subordinates' experience of relationship harmony is a culturally grounded mediating mechanism, beyond leader-member exchange, linking leader's humor to subordinates' perceptions of leadership warmth and competence. We collected a two-wave sample in Taiwan (n = 166) and in the U.S. (n = 202) through internet platforms. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping were employed to test both direct and indirect effects, and measurement invariance was assessed to ensure sample comparability. We found that the mediating effects of relationship harmony at work only exist in the Taiwan data, not in the U.S. data. Our results of the Taiwan data showed that acts of humor are associated with perceptions of leadership warmth and competence via an elevated level of harmony. Our results suggest that both cultural-free construct (e.g., LMX) and cultural-specific construct (e.g., relationship harmony) could operate simultaneously within a given cultural context (in our case, in Chinese contexts).