Effort–Reward Imbalance and Employee Performance With the Moderating Roles of Overcommitment and Humor

Drawing on the effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model of stressful work, this study examined the role of humor styles and overcommitment as moderating the associations between the effort–reward ratio and employee performance. Data were collected from 399 employee–supervisor dyads. Employees completed questionnaires assessing their affiliative and self-enhancing humor, overcommitment, and ERI. Their supervisors assessed their subordinates’ task performance, creative performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and destructive deviance (DD). Our findings indicate that as employees’ perception of the workplace’s cost–gain ratio deteriorated, their task performance, citizenship behavior, and workplace creativity were lower. Overcommitment potentiates the negative relationship of ERI with task performance. However, self-enhancing humor buffered the associations between ERI, task performance, creative performance, citizenship behavior, and DD. Whereas the findings highlight the contribution of stressful work in terms of ERI to poor employee performance, they point to an important buffering role of selfenhancing humor.