Leader humor across levels.

Leaders use humor. This humor has real effects and has been a topic of scholarly interest. We review and interpret this literature though the lens of leader hierarchical level (front-line managers versus senior executives), enumerating intriguing research possibilities and practical implications.

Risqué business? Interpersonal anxiety and humor in the #MeToo era.

Interpersonal anxiety (i.e., the fear of negative consequences from interacting with someone) may be more prominent in post-#MeToo organizations when interacting with someone of a different gender.

Making things happen through challenging goals: leader proactivity, trust, and business-unit performance.

Building on decades of research on the proactivity of individual performers, this study integrates research on goal setting and trust in leadership to examine manager proactivity and business unit sales performance in one of the largest sales organizations in the United States. Results of a moderated-mediation model suggest that proactive senior managers establish more challenging goals for their business units (N = 50), which in turn are associated with higher sales performance. We further found that employees' trust in the manager is a critical contingency variable that facilitates the relationship between challenging sales goals and subsequent sales performance.

Do you see what we see? The complex effects of perceptual distance between leaders and teams.

Previous distance-related theories and concepts (e.g., social distance) have failed to address the sometimes wide disparity in perceptions between leaders and the teams they lead.

Silence speaks volumes: the effectiveness of reticence in comparison to apology and denial for responding to integrity- and competence-based trust violations.

Prior research on responses to trust violations has focused primarily on the effects of apology and denial. The authors extended this research by studying another type of verbal response that is often used to respond to trust violations but has not been considered in the trust literature: reticence. An accused party may use reticence in a sincere and even legitimate attempt to persuade a trustor to withhold judgment.

Removing the shadow of suspicion: the effects of apology versus denial for repairing competence- versus integrity-based trust violations.

Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of an apology versus a denial for repairing trust after an alleged violation. Results reveal that trust was repaired more successfully when mistrusted parties (a) apologized for violations concerning matters of competence but denied culpability for violations concerning matters of integrity, and (b) had apologized for violations when there was subsequent evidence of guilt but had denied culpability for violations when there was subsequent evidence of innocence. Supplementary analyses also revealed that the interactive effects of violation type and violation response on participants' trusting intentions were mediated by their trusting beliefs.