Humor long has been recognized as a mechanism for dealing with life’s problems and situational difficulties. Specifically, researchers have found that a sense of humor provides health benefits by generating social laughter, psychological benefits by venting anger and frustration and coping with stressful situations, social benefits by building sense of intimacy and community with others, and cognitive benefits related to problem solving such as generating creative ideas by humor. Recently, as several management researchers and business leaders regard a sense of humor as an important factor in strategic management, the effects of a sense of humor on organizational performance have been actively examined. Although these studies have extended our understanding about how a sense of humor influences individual and organizational outcomes, several important issues need to be addressed. First, most of them have focused on examining the relationships between as sense of humor and individual creativity. Another important issue unresolved in humor research is the process by which a sense of humor is associated with individual outcomes although sociability and self-esteem as well self-efficacy can be intervening variables between them. In addition, studies on a sense of humor in South Korea have been mainly conducted in nursery, psychology, education, and advertisement as a coping mechanism for stressful situations. Researchers have paid little attention to examining the relationships between as sense of humor and individual outcomes, especially in management area. To address these issues, we examined how a sense of humor influenced a various kinds of performance at work and how self-efficacy mediated the relationships between them. We collected data from 20 various kinds of companies in terms of size and industry in South Korea 20 surveys were distributed to each company, a total of 400 surveys. Respondents were limited to middle managers regardless of regions and departments since one of the dependent variable (i.e., career performance) requires a certain level of work experiences. Of 201 surveys collected (i.e., response rate = 50.3 %), we deleted 20 ones due to centralization tendency and missing values. The average of a sense of humor was 3.56, which is not high on a 5-point Likert-type scale. However, it was a little bit higher than those reported in the United States (i.e., 2.91 in Thorson and Powell (1991); 2.90 in Thorson et al. (1997). As expected, a sense of humor was significantly correlated with self-efficacy and self-efficacy was significantly correlated with various kinds of performance at work. To test the research hypotheses, we used a regression analysis and Baron and Kenny’s (1986) approach. Results revealed the positive effects of a sense of humor on job, career, creativity, and team performance. In addition, self-efficacy significantly mediated the relationships between a sense of humor and job, career, creativity, and team performance. This study provides several theoretical and practical implications. First, the study can contribute to humor research theoretically and empirically by showing that a sense of humor significantly influences various kinds of performance at work beyond individual creativity (e.g., career and team performance). In addition, this study theorized and empirically tested the mediating effects of self-efficacy on the relationships between a sense of humor and various kinds of performance at work. Given that most current humor research ignored the underlying processes by which a sense of humor influences individual and organizational performance, this study is advanced. Future research needs to examine other psychological mechanisms that link between a sense of humor and employee outcomes beyond self-efficacy. For example, individuals with a high sense of humor can develop a better sociability that can help them build interpersonal relationships which in turn can influence individual and organizational performance positively. Findings in this study have also some practical implications in organizations. This study demonstrated that Korean companies need to use a sense of humor strategically and put more efforts to develop and improve employees’ sense of humor to improve organizational and individual performance
