Humor Styles as New Resources in a Primary Preventive Perspective: Reducing Resistance to Change for Negotiation

Reducing resistance to change is fundamental to dealing with the rapid and continuous changes of the 21st century labor market. Personality traits have been widely studied in relation to resistance to change. However, personality is not completely suitable for primary prevention intervention, since it does not change over time. Instead, humor styles appear to be a promising preventive resource to facilitate the negotiation process by enabling individuals to cope with the current work environment. Using a sample of 149 university students, this study analyzed the relationship between personality traits, such as extraversion and emotionality, humor styles, and resistance to change. The mediation analysis highlighted that both affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles could promote integrative negotiations within organizations in relation to change, due to their negative relationships with resistance to change. Thus, implementing dedicated interventions to increase the usage of affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles could help in lowering the failure risk in negotiation processes, supporting changes.