Abstract

This study assesses the impact of employee use of jokes embedded in face-to-face conversations with customers. Our main finding — derived from experiments in which employee use of jokes was manipulated — was that jokes reduced customer satisfaction. This reduction occurred regardless if jokes were related or unrelated to the employee’s overall message. Our results also indicate that the use of jokes had a negative impact on perceived message relevance, and that perceived relevance mediated the link between employee use of jokes and customer satisfaction. In addition, our results show that no joke usage vs. joke usage did not produce different emotional responses. This suggests that the impact of jokes on affect is attenuated when jokes are embedded in conversational content.