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swinburne JUne 2009
Maren Rawlings
workplace
14
No joke when it’s
survival of
the funniest
story by Bianca Nogrady & Rebecca Thyer
In uncertain economic times when many
people are worried about keeping their jobs,
it’s understandable that some workplaces
may be losing the jocular banter that
otherwise relieves the working day.
But this doesn’t mean that humour has left
the office. Quite the contrary, it seems, with
humour acquiring a competitive edge as it
becomes part of some people’s survival strategy.
Qualitative evidence uncovered by
,,
When stress
levels increase
people tend
to use their
humour
competitively.”
Maren Rawlings
photo: paul Jones
Swinburne PhD researcher Maren Rawlings
suggests that some types of humour – the
type that targets particular people as the butt
of jokes – regularly occurs in the workplace.
And this type of humour could be on the rise.
Ms Rawlings, a psychologist in
Swinburne’s Faculty of Life and Social
Sciences and a former teacher, says that the
rate of competitive humour clearly increases
as work environments become more stressed.
“People are very generous to each other
when things are going well, but that starts
to change when workplaces become tense.
People start to compete and humour becomes
strategic.”
Although it might seem a trivial
consequence of a downturn in global fortunes,
this sort of humour has wider implications.
Ms Rawlings’s research is finding,
unsurprisingly, that ‘bad humour’ can reduce
people’s job satisfaction and their perception
of their own and others’ productivity.
Ms Rawlings has measured the impact
on organisations of how humour is used at
work. This has led to her development of a
tool that assesses workplace humour.
Called the Humour at Work scale (HAW)
it is a proxy measure of the atmosphere of
a workplace and it predicts employees’ job
satisfaction. She has found that it can explain
variations in productivity between offices or
worksites.
The HAW scale is likely to be
commercialised later this year for use by
human resources units to sample an office
climate, without the need to ask unwelcome
questions. “It asks about humour in the
workplace, not about an individual’s fear or
job satisfaction, so workers are more likely
to respond to it,” Ms Rawlings says.
Ms Rawlings began studying how humour
is used at work and the difference it can
make to the office environment as part of her
PhD at Swinburne, with Dr Bruce Findlay.
She wrote 150 items, 75 about how an
individual uses humour and 75 about how an
individual sees other people use humour, and
gave them to more than 350 participants in
an international internet survey.
From this research, which examined the
reasons why people use humour and also
other people’s reactions to that humour, she
was able to articulate two clear sets of factors
defining ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ humour
environments. These led to two scales: one
for a pleasant climate where humour puts
people at ease and its flipside, an unpleasant
climate, where humour is nasty.
The next step was to ascertain what
difference these climates made. To answer
this, Ms Rawlings surveyed 400 Australian
working people to calibrate her humour scale
against job satisfaction and other workplace
measures, including one that predicted
productivity. She found the more there was
positive humour in a workplace, the more
satisfied employees were. This shouldn’t
come as a surprise, but she found it did fly
in the face of a common management belief
that ‘joking around’ was bad for workplace
efficiency.
High results on the unpleasant humour
climate scale correlated strongly with low
job satisfaction and with low scores on the
occupational climate measure that predicted
productivity.
Continuing research has allowed her
to show that an unpleasant workplace
environment, particularly the presence
of negative humour, could be increasing
people’s anxiety at work and eroding people’s
job satisfaction so much that productivity
levels could be reduced by nearly 20 per cent
compared with those being achieved in more
relaxed or ‘fun’ workplaces.
Because her research has coincided
with the deteriorating global economy,
Ms Rawlings has received anecdotal
evidence on its impact on office humour
too: “People are either saying there is now
no humour at work or that the humour is
grim,” she says. “Also, when stress levels
increase people tend to use their humour
competitively.” ••
* Ms Rawlings’ humour knowledge has been
recognised internationally. In July 2008 she
was awarded a Certificate of Merit and a
cash prize from the International Society
for Humour Studies for her postgraduate
presentation at its conference in Spain.
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine