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The interest on leader humor styles is recent. By applying a trustworthiness framework, the authors examine (1) how leader humor styles contribute to performance and deviance via trust in the supervisor and (2) who benefits/suffers the most from different leader humor styles.

The authors tested their hypotheses in a sample of 428 employee–supervisor dyads from 19 organizations operating in the services sector.

Affiliative and self-enhancing leader humor styles are particularly beneficial for employees with low core-self-evaluations, helping them develop trust in the supervisor and consequently improving their performance. An aggressive leader humor style, via decreased trust in the supervisor, reduces performance, regardless of employees' core self-evaluations. Self-enhancing and self-defeating leader humor styles also present significant relationships with organizational deviance.

Limitations include the cross-sectional design and the limited number of mechanisms examined.

Organizations need to train leaders in the use of humor and develop a culture where beneficial humor styles are endorsed, while detrimental humor styles are not tolerated.

These findings contribute to the literatures on trust and humor, by showing that the use of humor is not as trivial as one could initially think, particularly for those with low core self-evaluations, and by expanding our knowledge of the mechanisms by which different leader humor styles may influence performance and deviance.

The present research examined the interactive effect of subordinates' and their supervisors' social value orientations (SVO) on abusive supervision and its consequence for in-role performance.

In study 1, we provided a survey to 420 subordinates and 115 supervisors from 42 organizations. HLM was used to test the hypothesized cross-level moderated mediation model. In study 2, 78 participants were asked to imagine they were a supervisor and responded to a potential scenario where supervisor and subordinate prosocial and proself orientations toward the organization were manipulated (2 × 2 design).

Study 1 showed that when supervisors have a higher prosocial motivation, subordinates who are more self-interested (proself) report more abuse than those with a higher prosocial motivation, with negative consequences for in-role performance. Study 2 replicated the pattern: participants (in the role as supervisor) with induced prosocial goals rated abusive supervision behaviors as more justified and acceptable toward a proself employee than they did toward a prosocial employee.

This research is innovative by bridging SVO and organizational literatures and demonstrating that a dyadic interaction between a proself subordinate and a prosocial supervisor may produce a reactive perpetrator – provocative victim relationship characterized by higher abusive supervision.