From Bored to Board: How Humor Leads the Way
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2025-12-17
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en
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Abstract
Humor is a common feature of workplace interaction, yet its role in formal governance settings
such as boardroom meetings remains poorly understood. While governance research has
increasingly focused on interactional dynamics, little is known about how humor shapes collective
engagement during formal decision making. This study examines how different humor styles,
affiliative and aggressive humor, relate to director engagement in boardroom meetings. Drawing
on video recordings of 25 board meetings from two Dutch water authorities, the study analyzes
humor as it naturally occurs in a public governance context. Director engagement is
operationalized as the number of unique speakers per agenda item, and humor instances are
systematically coded as affiliative or aggressive. Hierarchical regression analyses, robustness
checks, and a negative binomial regression are used to test the hypotheses. The findings show that
affiliative humor consistently and positively relates to director engagement by encouraging a larger
number of board members to contribute to the discussion. In contrast, aggressive humor does not
show the expected negative relationship with engagement. Instead, its effects are weaker and
inconsistent, and in some robustness models even slightly positive, indicating that its influence
depends on context. Overall, the findings indicate that inclusive, relationship oriented humor plays
an important role in promoting engagement in highly structured governance settings.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen