How leader humor boost employee innovative behavior in stress? A cross-level moderated mediation model

Previous studies have found that leader humor exerts an impact on employees’ affection and cognition, thus promoting innovative behavior. However, the effectiveness of leaders in activating employees’ motivation to innovate through the expression of humor, especially in stressful situations, is still unknown. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory and Emotional Contagion theory, we explore how leaders use humor to stimulate harmonious passion of employees and promote innovative behavior under two typical stressful situations of high performance expectation and team relationship conflict. The cross-level moderated mediation model is tested using data collected from 458 employees and 99 supervisors in 10 manufacturing companies in the Yangtze River Delta region of China. Our findings reveal that leader humor positively affects employee innovative behavior by fostering greater harmonious passion. Additionally, we discover that the effect of leader humor on harmonious passion is enhanced when employees are faced with higher performance expectation and greater team relationship conflict, which in turn generates more innovative behaviors. Our study focuses on the social attributes of leader humor, enriches the research on leader humor expression in stressful situations and unveils the effective pathway to promote employee innovative behavior from a motivational perspective.