Humor Usage by Salespeople: A Socio-Psychological Inquiry of Antecedents and Outcomes in Professional Selling
Year: 2017
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: As a cue for laughter in interpersonal communications, humor has been observed in various professional selling occasions.This dissertation aims at quantitatively investigate the antecedents and outcomes of salespeople's humor usage in sales communications.A research framework with ten hypotheses is built to describe why or when humor messages are created by salespeople, and then why or how humor messages, as an interpersonal sales communication tool, influence various performance outcomes in professional selling.It is proposed that humor usage by salespeople is positively influenced by higher creativity, stronger learning orientation, greater sales effort, and a higher degree of role stress represented by role ambiguity, role conflict, and task overload.In turn, humor usage by salespeople may positively influence customer relationship quality in terms of trust, commitment, and relationship satisfaction, as well as salespeople's job performance.To test the hypotheses, a series of multiple regression analyses are performed using survey data collected from 407 salespeople.The results provide insights about salespeople humor usage in a number of aspects.First, creative salespeople are more likely to find the appropriate and actionable contextual cues to form humor messages in
Author: Valerie Wang
Institution: Ohio University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2778099075