“It’s the story of three guys who walk into a bar…” Depending on your place in the hierarchy, your company jokes will more or less hit the mark. In any case, this is what is stated a study published in January 2024 in the Academy Management Journal. However, nothing forces us to laugh more at the boss’s jokes. Worse still, lending yourself to this game would not be without consequences. In sociology, we talk about “surface acting”. To put it simply, these are simulated emotions, often by group effect.
To conduct their study, the academics asked an actor to make jokes to people around him, in order to see how they would react. Participants tended to force themselves to laugh at his jokes, but their reactions were even more exaggerated when the actor played an authority figure in their eyes, and not just a nice person. But over time, this double game can be a real source of anxiety. The employee who forces himself, even unconsciously, to laugh at his boss’s witticisms may feel a big gap between what he feels and what he will express.
The anxiety game
Simple forced laughter can cost you dearly in the long run. According to Daphnée Breton, work psychologist, the employee who lends himself too much to the game quickly falls into an unhealthy spiral: “it can become a source of suffering or anxiety because we enter into a conflict of values here. We can quickly fear that we will lose our dignity, even our ideal. »
And even the least laughing colleagues can find themselves participating in this hypocritical laughter. However, nothing explicitly forced them to do so. Because if the knife is not put to the throats of employees, these false laughter are witnesses to a balance of power which is very real: “We see the emergence of management techniques which have become diluted in cultures business and in the way of managing teams. Since the 1980s, emotion has had a very strong place. In some companies, we put behavior first, even before the quality of work,” explains Daphnée Breton.
An effort as exhausting as it is anxiety-inducing
We quickly think we’re out of trouble with this laughter that doesn’t have an ounce of sincerity. Because although the practice may stroke the ego of the hierarchy and easily attract its good favors, the fact remains that it is energy-consuming in the long term. Study co-signer, Randall Peterson explains that “when the boss tells a joke that is not hilarious, the employee must decide whether to pretend to laugh or not. This decision requires energy, whatever it may be. If he pretends to laugh, it’s additional emotional labor that takes energy away from the work.”
But researchers are not preachers of seriousness in all circumstances either. Laughing has great virtues and for Randall Peterson, it’s all a question of balance: “It’s possible to overdose on a good thing! More isn’t always better. Humor is a bit like pot: a little goes a long way, and not everyone likes it,” Randall Peterson points out to Business Insider. As always, it’s all about moderation. But this problem above all reflects structural insecurities in the job market (insecurity, unemployment) which lead us to adopt behaviors that we disapprove of.
Stop the cycle
For Daphnée Breton, we must still be able to calm things down and say stop when certain limits are crossed: “If we take questions of sexism or sexual harassment, we see that silence has allowed them to persist. You must not betray your deep convictions. » To put an end to this atmosphere of false good humor, stop laughing at the boss’s lame jokes. Failing to have the killer line, settle for an icy silence which will make your superior understand why a career as a comedian was probably not for him.