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If youve ever been personally victimized by one too many bad jokes from a boss while standing around the water cooler, youre not the only oneand now theres research to substantiate that a boss whos trying too hard to be funny is no laughing matter. The finding that poor attempts at humor from a higher-up might actually affect job satisfaction, and not in a good way, comes from a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal and conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the course of several different sessions, the researchers found that leaders who went overboard on puns and jokes drained their employees emotional energy, leading to reduced job satisfaction. The results are clear: When it comes to keeping up rapport at the office, its probably best to drop the Michael Scott act. Pretending to find your boss funny is draining In an initial study, researchers took to the field in Southern China. They paired up 88 managers and employees for a week-long period, during which one group of managers was told to improve general leader-follower interactions, while the other group was instructed to use humor in their interactions with employees, according to an article in the Harvard Business Review. At the end of the week, employees in the latter group reported elevated rates of surface acting”basically, pretending to find their boss funny in order to keep up morale. This additional emotional labor caused these employees to experience elevated levels of exhaustion, and in turn, dissatisfaction with their jobs. Authenticity matters A second study, conducted in the lab, found that there are further variables which can heighten or lessen the negative funny manager effect. This study followed 212 participants at a U.S. business school, who were told they would be part of a series of focus groups at a campus bookstore and then divided into high humor and low humor manager groups. This time, the researchers experimented with two different kinds of leaders, one who wore formal attire and took a more authoritative tone, and another who dressed casually and introduced himself with his first name. Once again, participants in all of the high humor groups were more exhausted and less satisfied. However, their negative feelings were magnified when paired with the more authoritative boss. The moderator had a lot of puns . . . I pretended to laugh to be nice, one participant in the authoritative group recalled. According to the researchers, this difference is attributable to the perceived power difference between the boss and their employees. The wider that gap grows, the more likely it is that excessive jokes will leave a bad taste in everyones mouth. Bosses, keep the puns to a minimum, even if they’re good For managers, these findings demonstrate that humor works best when its coming from an authentic place, rather than being used as a pre-calculated tool to encourage camaraderie. And even in the case of spontaneous humor, it might be best to think twice before you fire off the third pun in a row. Our findings challenge the assumption that leader humor is always a good thing, the researchers write for HBR. When used too frequentlyespecially when followers hold high power distance valuesit can backfire. [. . .] Instead, our results suggest that leaders should focus on fewer, higher-impact humor expressions. Less, in this case, might truly be more.
Category:
E-Commerce
The acting chief of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday he has directed staff to look at ways to abandon a plan that would have widened the definition of alternative trading systems to include some cryptocurrency firms. The SEC in 2022 proposed requiring some crypto firms to register as alternative trading systems, drawing criticism from the sector in the face of potentially heightened oversight and additional rules. Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda told an audience of bankers he has instructed staff to look at ways to abandon that portion of the plan, which has yet to be finalized. It was an expansion of an earlier effort aimed at trading of Treasuries markets, Uyeda said in prepared remarks. “In my view, it was a mistake for the Commission to link together regulation of the Treasury markets with a heavy-handed attempt to tamp down the crypto market,” Uyeda said. He said he has also asked SEC staff to renew discussions with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and market participants to consider the original plans for regulatory changes on the government securities alternative trading systems. The 2022 proposal was part of a broader effort by the SEC under Democratic leadership to better protect investors by subjecting the crypto sector to a host of rules and requirements. Under Republican leadership, the SEC in January launched a crypto task force to overhaul its crypto policy and has begun pausing or dismissing pending lawsuits against crypto firms. Chris Prentice, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
A “massive cyberattack” is causing disruptions to X, the platform’s owner and Trump senior advisor Elon Musk claimed Monday. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” he wrote in a post on the social media platform. He added the company was “tracing” the source. Users reported intermittent outages on the social media platform on Monday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. In 2022, Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion and made wide-sweeping cuts to its staff and changes to its content policies. Since then, the billionaire Tesla CEO has endeared himself to President Trump and now plays a key role in the current administration. Musk, leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has brought crews of young tech workers to Washington, D.C., to slash government budgets and workforces. But Musk’s recent rightward shift and current chaos propagating has caused massive backlash against the world’s richest man. Shares of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, were down 14% on Monday. The stock has sunk more than 35% in the past month as sales slumped in Europe and investors feared his political activities were taking too much time away from managing his EV company. Tesla has also been the focus of protests, with many taking to dealerships to call out Musk’s sweeping cuts. Musk had a simple response to an X user who theorized that a mysterious “they” wanted “to silence you and this platform,” leading to the attack. “Yes,” he said.
Category:
E-Commerce
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