When boss's bad jokes can improve your job satisfaction

New York: If relationships are good, use of both positive and negative humour by leaders can help improve their subordinates' job satisfaction, suggests new research.

"Generally, people think that positive humour, which is inclusive, affiliative and tasteful, is good in leadership, and negative humour, which is aggressive and offensive, is bad," said one of the researchers Christopher Robert, associate professor at University of Missouri in the US.

Specifically, both positive and negative humour use by leaders is positively related to their subordinates' job satisfaction when the relationship between the leader and subordinates is good.

However, when the leader-subordinate relationship is bad, both negative and positive types of humour are associated with lower job satisfaction.

In other words, for leaders, sometimes good humour has bad effects and bad humour has good effects on subordinates.To test their theory, the researchers developed two sets of matched questionnaires, one for leaders and one for their subordinates.

They analysed responses from about 70 leaders and their 241 subordinates in 54 organisations.