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2024 AOM Annual Meeting

OMT

Session: 1715: Discourse, Framing and Storytelling in Leadership and Entrepreneurship: Say What You Wanna Say

1715: (No) Laughting Matters: A Multimodal Exploration of Humor in Leader’s External Communication (18890)

Monday, August 12, 2024

16:45 – 18:15 CT (GMT-5/UTC-5)

Location: Fairmont: Imperial Ballroom

Session Number: 1715
Paper Session
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/qdm9kd

Author(s)

NM

Niklas Mueller

U. of Passau, Germany
SK

Steffen Klug

U. of Passau, Germany
AK

Andreas Sebastian Konig

U. of Passau, Germany
BS

Benno Stöcklein

U. of Passau, Germany
DB

Dominik Bong

U. of Passau, Germany
AK

Alexander Kathan

U. of Augsburg
LC

Lukas Christ

U. of Augsburg
SA

Shahin Amiriparian

U. of Augsburg, Germany

Humor is a central element of leaders’ external communication, but scholarly explorations lack a conceptually rigorous, rich data exploration of spontaneous leader humor. We therefore study a unique sample of press conferences held by professional soccer coaches to multimodally examine different types of leader humor—affiliative, self-enhanced, self-defeating, and aggressive—using text, audio, and video data. We present findings in two central areas: first, the challenges of validly capturing leader humor, and second, leaders’ use of humor in external communication. In particular, we successfully train a supervised machine learning framework corroborating the validity of our manual human humor annotations. Moreover, we observe that leaders express humor primarily in clusters, either at the beginning or towards the end of press conferences; and only half of the humor instances occur with laughter, which undermines previous approaches of using laughter as a proxy for leader humor. Overall, our research offers unique grounding for the notion that externally-oriented leader humor is deeply embedded in social rituals and practices. We also reiterate the need for an unobtrusive, type-specific, and multimodal exploration of leader humor, and provide guidelines for further research.

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