The More Humorous the Leaders are, the More Proactive the Employees will be? The Mediation Role of Emotional Exhaustion

From the prospective of Conservation of Resources theory, this paper discusses leader humor’s impact on employee proactive behavior and the mediation role of emotional exhaustion in Chinese situation. By building a structural equation model to analyze the field data collected from 175 employees, the empirical results show that leader humor exerts a significantly positive effect on employee proactive behavior and specifically, leader humor will improve employee proactive behavior by reducing employee emotional exhaustion. Chinese leaders are suggested to pay more positive attention to humor’s positive effect and supposed to take advantage of humor to increase employee proactive behaviors in future competition. Keywords—leader humor; employee proactive behavior; emotional exhaustion Introduction