It is all in good humor? Examining the impact of salesperson evaluations of leader humor on salesperson job satisfaction and job stress

Abstract

Salesperson job stress and job satisfaction have been identified as critical factors affecting job performance. Academic research suggests that sales managers can influence salesperson job stress and job satisfaction. Interestingly, a review of the sales literature finds very little research on the impact of sales leader humor usage on the stress and satisfaction of salespeople. Consequently, we explore how salespeople’s evaluation of their manager’s use of humor influences their individual levels of job stress and satisfaction. We investigate both the positive and negative roles of humor by analyzing the impact of salesperson evaluations of their managers’ use of affiliative and aggressive humor on their job stress and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we examine the mechanism by which these evaluations affect salesperson stress and satisfaction by identifying two critical mediating variables – social loneliness and willingness to cooperate. Using a sample of 299 professional salespeople, we empirically test this process model to find that affiliative humor usage by sales managers, as evaluated by salespeople, reduces social loneliness and stress for salespeople while also increasing followers’ acceptance of cooperation. Evaluations of aggressive humor, on the other hand, increase stress levels among salespeople. Both social loneliness and acceptance of cooperation, in turn, significantly affect job satisfaction.     

Divided attention between simultaneous auditory and visual signals

Past studies of simultaneous attention to pairs of visual stimuli have used the “dual-task” paradigm to show that identification of the direction of a change in luminance, whether incremental or decremental, is “capacity-limited,” while simple detection of these changes is governed by “capacity-free” processes. On the basis of that finding, it has been suggested that the contrast between identification and detection reflects different processes in the sensory periphery, namely the responses of magno- and parvocellular receptors. The present study questions that assertion and investigates the contribution of central processing in resource limitation by applying the dual task to a situation in which one stimulus is auditory and one is visual. The results are much the same as before, with identification demonstrating the tradeoff in performance generally attributed to a limited capacity but detection showing no loss compared with single-task controls. This implies that limitations on resources operate at a central level of processing rather than in the auditory and visual peripheries.     

非形式逻辑与演绎主义

非形式逻辑出现于上个世纪70年代,它首先是一种寻求更好的大学逻辑教学方式的努力。进而,非形式逻辑学者们逐渐开始触及和探讨越来越多的理论议题,即发展不依赖于形式逻辑的关于论证以及好论证的理解方式。在1998年世界哲学大会上,布莱尔和我阐释了非形式逻辑为哲学所带来的理论后果,其中一点我们称之为“演绎主义的终结”。那时我们并未给出演绎主义的定义,而只是把它等同于麦金泰尔的那个精炼的说法：“任何推理,不是演绎的,就是有缺陷的。”但现在看来,我们在当时就作出“演绎主义的终结”这一论断,显然是有点为时过早了。因为演绎主义似乎至今都还很有生命力,甚至在那些倾向于非形式逻辑的学者那里它也能得到支持：恩尼斯长期以来都辩护演绎主义是一种论证重构策略,格罗尔克更是致力于辩护它是一种论证评价理论。在本文中我将论证,非形式逻辑最好被理解为一种不诉诸于演绎技巧和演绎规范的逻辑研究。当我们意识到演绎和演绎主义已经如何深深地扎根于我们的哲学发展史中,并且牢牢地控制了我们关于逻辑研究的理解,我们就能明白非形式逻辑这一理论努力是多么的困难和重要。我将首先澄清“演绎主义”的意思,然后再分别考察那些赞成和反对演绎主义的论证,最后,我将表明非形式逻辑是从演绎主义中挽救逻辑的理论尝试。