Principal's humor increases staff job satisfaction
Leading a school in today's stressful environment is a very serious and
demanding business, but a new study published in Educational Studies
concludes that principals who manage to inject some levity into their schools
create a happier workplace.
Principals have been shown to exert a major
influence on a school's climate and culture, writes researcher Lee Hurren of the
University of North Alabama. A principal with a sense of humor translates into
higher teacher satisfaction with often-pressure-filled jobs. "To many," he says,
"a sense of humor is a necessary attribute of a good leader."
To examine the effect of humor on teacher job satisfaction Hurren surveyed
471 Nevada teachers. A total of 209 elementary school teachers, 99 middle school
teachers and 157 secondary school teachers returned surveys.
Participants in the study were given a definition of humor and asked to
evaluate the frequency of humor used by their principals in general and in
several specific situations: private meetings (principal and teacher), small
meetings (2-10 teachers), and large meetings (more than 10 teachers). The
definition of humor used in the survey was "any message, verbal or nonverbal,
that is communicated by the principal and evokes feelings of positive amusement
by the participant." For each situation, teachers were asked to indicate how
often their principal used humor during 30 minutes of communication.
Teachers showed higher job satisfaction scores when principals share any
number of humorous comments during 30 minutes of communication than when zero
humorous comments are shared by the principal.
Overall, the more humor
used during the meetings the higher the level of job satisfaction. The
survey contained 17 items and a five-point Likert-type rating scale
ranging from a high of 85 to a low of 17 for job satisfaction. Hurren concedes
that there are several risks to injecting more humor into schools, including the
fear that it can cause an unnecessary distraction.
"A principal using
humor may cause participants in a meeting to want to tell their own humorous
stories during the meeting. It is also possible that some will think the message
is not very important if the principal is going to joke about it." But he
concludes, "This study has found reason to believe that as more principals dare
to share humor and laugh with their teachers, more schools will become better
places to teach and learn." Be careful in advising others to use more levity,
however. Hurren notes that almost everyone thinks they have a good sense of
humor.
"The effects of principals' humor on teachers' job
satisfaction," by B. Lee Hurren, Educational Studies, Volume 32, Number 4,
December 2006, pp. 373-385.
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