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Abstract
Authentic leaders endeavor to create an environment of relational transparency, which is proposed to evoke trust in leader-follower relationships. An important proposed outcome of this relationship is enhanced creative performance. This relationship can be more effectively facilitated through a leader's use of an appropriate style of humor delivery, which enhances followers' positive emotions and also results in higher creative performance. A 2 x 4 experimental study is proposed where a virtual leader's delivery of humor will have positive effects on follower positive emotions. The same leader's relational transparency, an important component of authenticity and authentic leadership, will also influence followers' trust in the leader. Positive emotions and trust are important mediators in the relationships between humor delivery and transparency, respectively, on the followers' creative performance. Although significant linkages were found between several of the humor conditions and between relational transparency and trust, the findings were largely non-supportive of the hypotheses advanced herein. A series of supplemental analyses were conducted post hoc using methods such as Partial Least Squares. These methods were more robust given the data considerations and yielded important findings with regard to participants' perceptions of transparency and their relationship with perceptions of leader behavior and the outcome variables. Furthermore, by collapsing the humor conditions into simpler comparisons, significant differences were discovered between the groups exposed to humor versus those who were not. A discussion of the results is followed by a discussion of the study limitations, which offers suggestions for future research.
