Emotional culture and humor in organizations: A social-functional approach.

Adopting a social-functionalist theoretical lens, this review examines emotional culture and its relation to discrete emotions such as joviality and humor-supportive or "joking" organizational cultures. We propose four primary pathways through which humor influences emotional culture in organizations and social units: (1) creating and defining emotional culture through "bottom-up" affective mechanisms, (2) a "top-down" normative function that promotes or inhibits humor through cultural values, norms, and traditions of organizational life, (3) a maintenance function, whereby humor corrects emotional culture norm violations, and (4) a link to positive work outcomes via a reciprocal feedback loop. We also describe negative consequences of humor for emotional culture, highlight unanswered questions in the literature, and suggest future research opportunities, including a comprehensive new framework.

The psychological and financial impacts of an emotional culture of anxiety and its antidote, an emotional culture of companionate love.

Rationale: Anxiety is an increasingly common problem in society, including at work, yet the effects of an emotional culture of anxiety remain unexplored. We offer a new lens on anxiety in the workplace, examining its collective enactment in the form of an emotional culture of anxiety.

Objective: This study examines the implications of an emotional culture of anxiety for psychological and financial outcomes within a poorly performing healthcare organization.