Drawing on the humor-as-social-information (HASI) framework, this study tests whether leader humor relates to follower organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through follower workplace status, the framework’s inferential pathway, while modeling an affective pathway (follower affective commitment) in parallel as an alternative explanatory mechanism, and whether follower narcissism moderates the translation of workplace status into OCB.
Multi-wave survey data from 282 employees in South Korean organizations were analyzed using sequential regression and bootstrapped path analysis, including a formal moderated-mediation test.
Leader humor was positively associated with follower workplace status, which mediated the humor–OCB link even with affective commitment modeled in parallel. Follower narcissism weakened the relationship between workplace status and OCB. The indirect effect of leader humor on OCB through workplace status showed a directionally consistent pattern of attenuation at higher levels of narcissism, although the index of moderated mediation was not statistically significant.
The study isolates HASI’s inferential pathway by benchmarking it against the established affective pathway and specifies follower narcissism as a boundary condition at the stage where perceived status is translated into citizenship behavior.
