The work environment is surely one of the environments in which we most take care of our way of behaving , especially when we are young or have just started a new job. Does our way of being or acting influence our professional career? According to the experts, a lot, and it can be as important as the fact of leaving our skin to perform our work well.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzes the relationships between employment status and a sense of humor, and concludes that, if used correctly, it can be beneficial, since it makes a good impression on those around us, whether they are colleagues or bosses. A fun person transmits confidence, and in fact they can come to be perceived as more confident and competent than they really are.
The sense of humor is often seen as something superfluous, and we rarely realize that it is an attribute that greatly affects relationships and hierarchies that are established both in the workplace and in the personal. “We do many things to improve our status. We work hard. We try to show that we are really smart . And what we have discovered is that humor is one of those tools that can help us achieve our goal,” explains Maurice Schweitzer, one of the authors and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“If you are brave enough to make a joke, regardless of whether it is successful or not, people will perceive you as someone confident and competent, as well as possessing great emotional intelligence, ” says Alison W. Brooks, co-author of the work and researcher at Harvard University.
The authors decided to conduct the study after realizing that many recent graduates, when joining their first job, deliberately hide their personalities for fear of falling ill and losing the opportunity to advance in their careers. “Often they are in a kind of ‘prison of silence’ and they don’t express themselves as they are, because they know the risks that this entails,” explains Brooks.
Don’t go overboard with the jokes
Of course, this does not mean that you have to go through jokes without any filter. Jokes and humor move a fine line between what is socially correct and what is inappropriate. A joke in bad taste or that touches on a sensitive topic can have the opposite effect than expected and cause us some displeasure, who knows if it will even lead to dismissal. Above all, it is better to let common sense prevail: you must not go overboard, at the risk of ending up being ‘the heavy joke’, you must know who to spend an innocent and who not, and what topics to play according to the moment.
This is one of the few works that delves into the influence of humor, and shows that, indeed, it greatly influences us in how we perceive other people, in certain cognitive behaviors and in the relationships that we establish both inside and outside our work environment .
