Organizational culture and performance: Moderated mediation role of engagement and supervisor humor

Although all public and private organizations, business owners and leaders around the globe constantly try to improve their organization’s performance, still many organizations and industries face a decline in their performance. Achieving target performance is not an easy task and organizations still struggle with this goal, as there are many factors involved. Human capital is one of the most important factors in the productivity of organizations. Employee performance is essentially the financial or nonfinancial outcome of employees, and it is directly associated with the performance and achievements of an organization. These are the people who spin the wheels of industries. But what makes employees to be more engaged and perform better? Keeping the employees motivated in this challenging environment is a big burden on department leaders and the organization as a whole. Pervious scholars have identified the deficiencies in healthcare services. Although improving performance in the healthcare system is a universal attempt, none of the tools currently in use for improving performance in public health services is flawless. Strategy, structure, leadership and organizational culture are known to be antecedents of performance. However, there is a lack of research that examines a comprehensive model encompassing all these variables and their influence on employee performance. As such, the current study proposes to investigate several options for improving employee performance. This study intends to use the competing value framework (CVF) of corporate culture . It is a complete framework that considers strategy, structure, and leadership. It also relates culture to performance. One essential approach to developing performance management practices is to focus on promoting employee engagement as a driver of performance enhancement. Engaged employees typically perform better than others in the workplace. In general, affective and motivational constructs (job engagement, job involvement, job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and affective commitment) are shown to have an influence on employee performance and citizenship behavior. II A key element of organizational life is relationships. The interaction with the supervisors is vital for the employees in order to gain access to personal and social resources. It is likely that employees who have better interactions with their managers, show a higher level of commitment to the organization, which leads to improved performance and productivity. Therefore, this study intends to propose humor as a managerial tool that may improve relationships and communication between employees and managers. This in turn, would motivate employees to be more engaged and perform better. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between organizational culture and in-role and extra-role performance of employees through the mediating role of engagement. It also aims to show how supervisor humor might impact this relationship as a moderator. The major findings of this study indicate that 1) All types of organizational culture (clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy) have correlation with employee engagement 2) Clan and adhocracy cultures have stronger relationships with employee engagement than the other two culture types 3) The different types of organizational culture have correlation with some components of in-role and extra-role performance 4) Employee engagement strongly mediates the relationship between organizational culture and in-role and extra-role performance 5) Supervisor humor moderates the relationship between organizational culture and engagement and also between organizational culture and in-role and extra-role performance. The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of culture is dominant in public organizations, and how we can improve the engagement and performance of employees in different kinds of culture. Motivational drivers like fun and humor in the workplace have been taken for granted, despite the fact that humor is known as a managerial tool (Axtell Ray 1986), which can smooth communications, especially between leaders (supervisors) and employees. The quality of communication has strong correlation with team performance (Marlow et al. 2017). Therefore, we hypothesized that humor can act as a moderator between corporate culture and engagement and also between corporate culture and in-role and extra-role performance of employees. A comprehensive literature review was conducted as a background to form the hypotheses in this thesis. III We have expanded our hypotheses to the related literature in order to examine the relationships between our variables. After gathering N=316 usable questionnaires from public hospitals in Palermo, Italy, we managed to answer the research questions of the thesis. The results of our thesis confirmed the role of humor as a moderator for the engagement and performance of employees in different corporate cultures. The data analysis revealed that the association between corporate culture and engagement will increase if more of humorous communication exists between the supervisor and the supervisee, which proved the role of positive humor in the engagement and productivity of employees. Besides, it confirms that engagement mediates the association between the different elements of corporate culture and in-role and extra-role performance of employees. These types of studies will help strategic managers to predict the trade-offs involved in selecting a dominant type of culture and its influence on employee engagement and performance. By investigating the relationship between corporate culture and performance and the moderated mediation role of supervisor humor and engagement, this study illustrates how a managerial tool like humor can be used to improve the supervisor-supervisee relationship and thus create an environment that encourages higher engagement and consequently improved performance and organizational citizenship behavior of employees.