Understanding the role of gender in humor expression: Directions for future scholarship

Humor expression is a potent interpersonal and professional communication tool, conveying intelligence and competence. This review examines the role of gender in outcomes of humor expression, particularly in professional settings. Despite humor's association with masculinity and stereotypes that women are less funny than men, we highlight findings that suggest potentially nuanced benefits of humor for women, depending upon contextual moderators including humor type and status. However, we also highlight that extant findings are mixed, limited for methodological reasons, and in some cases, inconclusive, necessitating future scholarship. Given that humor can be a powerful tool, coupled with persistent gender gaps in leadership, we call for future research to better understand how, when, and why gender influences the effectiveness of humor expression.

Bright sparks and enquiring minds: Differential effects of goal orientation on the creativity trajectory

Why are some employees better than others at improving and maintaining their creativity over time? Despite decades of empirical study and theory on employee creativity, the temporal and developmental aspects of creativity are far from being fully understood. Emphasizing the dynamic nature of creativity, we propose that creativity trajectories are nonmonotonic, and that goal orientations explain individual variations in the ability to improve and sustain the productivity (number) and quality (novelty and usefulness) of ideas over time. Our findings from a longitudinal study at a manufacturing company suggest that employees with a learning orientation strive to develop their skills and thus improve the quality of their ideas at a faster rate and maintain it over time. Those with a performance orientation seek to demonstrate their skills, relying on existing frameworks that enable a larger number of ideas initially, yet ultimately undermine their creativity in the long term. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for fueling creativity over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Others' anger makes people work harder not smarter: the effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking

The authors examine whether and how observing anger influences thinking processes and problem-solving ability. In 3 studies, the authors show that participants who listened to an angry customer were more successful in solving analytic problems, but less successful in solving creative problems compared with participants who listened to an emotionally neutral customer. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors further show that observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems. Prevention orientation is argued to be the latent variable that mediated the effect of observing anger on complex thinking. The present findings help reconcile inconsistent findings in previous research, promote theory about the effects of observing anger and sarcasm, and contribute to understanding the effects of anger in the workplace.