Courage behind the laughter: dual-pathway linking perceived leader humor to followers’ constructive challenging behavior

Amid an increasingly uncertain business environment, whether subordinates can break their silence and proactively challenge potential deviations in leaders’ decisions has become a critical issue for organizational risk management and decision quality. Although existing research has extensively validated the positive effects of perceived leader humor, how it helps subordinates overcome hierarchical pressure and engage in such high-risk challenging behavior remains a black box. Drawing on the cognitive-affective processing system theory, we proposed an integrated dual-pathway model to examine how and when perceived leader humor is associated with followers’ constructive challenging behavior. We utilized a two-wave sample of 302 employees to test our hypotheses. The results show that perceived leader humor is significantly positively related to followers’ constructive challenging behavior. This relationship is mediated by followers’ psychological safety and fun experience, elucidating a dual-mechanism wherein perceived leader humor relates to followers’ constructive challenging behavior via a cognitive pathway (enhancing followers’ psychological safety) and an affective pathway (fostering followers’ fun experience). Furthermore, followers’ organizational identification only positively strengthens the mediating effect of the cognitive pathway.