Humor and job satisfaction

A correlation between positive humor and job satisfaction was established in an earlier meta-analysis (Mesmer-Magnus et al., 2012) [1] and appears to be replicated in more recent work. However, the relationship between humor and job satisfaction is more complex and nuanced than the straightforward contention that positive humor = good/negative humor = bad would imply. To expand on this idea, I review recent literature bearing on the relationship between humor and job satisfaction, including a) a broader set of criterion variables; b) relationships with negative forms of humor (e.g., aggressive); c) evidence for mediating and moderating processes in the humor-job satisfaction relationship; and d) issues related to causality.