ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the diverse ways that humor operates and functions in organizational networks. While traditional network frameworks can provide a helpful perspective on how entities are interconnected, such as examining positive and negative linkages as illustrated on the left side of Figure 4.1, or examining the density and centrality of network structures (Borgatti, Mehra, Brass, & Labianca, 2009), traditional social network frameworks have not been leveraged to provide a deeper theoretical treatment about how humor functions and operates in organizational networks. Likewise, even though research has examined psychological aspects of humor, such as it being triggered by violations that are seen as benign (McGraw, 2010; McGraw, Warren, Williams, & Leonard, 2012), much of the research has focused exclusively at the individual level (Mesmer-Magnus, Glew, & Viswesvaran, 2012) and not on how humor operates in networks. Taken together, very little theoretically-based research has examined how both psychological and network factors are involved in humor processes. Fortunately, with the recent development of dynamic network theory (Westaby, 2012), which combines psychological and network science, a novel platform is now available to attempt to portray some of the complex motivational and emotional ways in which humor operates in such settings.
