Use Humor to Cope with Stress on the Job

Good news if you've got a good sense of humor. You're better able to cope with on-the-job stress and you like your job more than some of your co-workers.

That's the conclusion of recent research by three professors at West Virginia University. Melanie Booth-Butterfield, Steven Booth-Butterfield, and Melissa Wanzer teamed to study the responses of 186 student workers. The researchers examined the volunteers' humor orientation, their ability to cope with stress, and their job satisfaction.

The study, published in the current issue of the academic journal Communication Quarterly, found that using humor was an effective way to cope with job stress. That, in turn, resulted in greater job satisfaction for the workers.

But could the cause_and_effect be reversed? Perhaps people who were happy with their jobs were more likely to tell jokes? Not so, the researchers said. Using a sophisticated statistical technique called path analysis, they found that job satisfaction was a result of humorous coping, not a cause of it.

Yes, but all of the volunteers were students. Is it possible that they handle job stress differently than adults? Again, the answer was no. The researchers checked their data with another group of adults and with nurses and found the same trend. Using humor "to cope with stress and thereby increase job satisfaction, is incredibly consistent across age and professional samples," they wrote.

"I firmly believe that the process of actively using humorous communication to cope with job stresses could apply widely in diverse organizations," Melanie Booth-Butterfield added. "The process is fundamental - you have job stress, you recognize it and move to handle it effectively by creating humor."

That is good news for those with a good sense of humor. It increases their chances for professional advancement. As the researchers noted, for those workers who can tell a good joke, "Making people laugh is a reliable and successful way of interacting."

Why does it work? The three researchers believe that humor forces the worker to view their problems from a broader perspective. Telling a joke about their professional predicament, they noted, "could force the individual outward . . . and away from their own internal distress."

"The ultimate goal is greater job satisfaction, or hopefully less job disgruntlement," Butterfield added. "We now have three separate data sets that demonstrate the positive effects of enacting humor. "

The researchers were careful to note that humor is not the only way to deal with on-the-job stress. So, if you're not good at telling jokes, you may have other ways of dealing with professional problems. Either way, though, alleviating that stress is important for keeping you happy in the workplace.

If you've got a sense of humor, you've got one extra tool for doing that.

REFERENCE

Booth_Butterfield, Melanie, Booth_Butterfield, Steven, & Wanzer, Melissa (2007). Funny students cope better: Patterns of humor enactment and coping effectiveness. Communication Quarterly, 55, 299-315.