Humor styles and its relationship with the sense of belonging among business school students in India

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Department of Business Administration, Turiba University,

Acharya Bangalore B-School

HUMOR STYLES AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SENSE OF BELONGING AMONG BUSINESS SCHOOL STUDENTS IN INDIA

S.A. Surya Kumar Research Scholar,

Dr. Prema R.K. Associate Professo,

Dr. B. Arul Senthil Assistant Professor

Riga, Bangalore

Annotation

The sense of humor is one of the differentiating behavioral trait which exists in human beings comparing to other species. However there are ample studies which have been done in the literature of humor. There are not much literature evidences relating the humor styles with sense of belonging among business students. Sense of belonging exists within every individual and it decides their level of commitment towards their community or team. It is a subjective feeling of an individual's significance in a group. There are certain humor styles which fosters team oriented behavior. Present study is conducted among business students in India identifying the humor styles and its impact on their sense of Belonging. A total of 125 full time MBA students from Business schools of Bangalore, India were involved in the study. The instruments used were Humor styles Questionnaire (HSQ) and Psychological Sense of Belonging (SOBI-P).The results shows that the students who can able to maintain the humour sense even in the difficult situations are more likely to experience community and peer acceptance, positive sense of belonging to the business school.

Key words: Humor styles,Sense of Belonging,Business students,Positive Psychology.

Introduction

There is an increasing need for the students to complete the higher education in a timely manner. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Centre (2015) reported that overall persistence rates are approaching 70%, which is an improvement over earlier years, when completion rates were as low as 50% (Tinto, 1975). Several factors contribute to the motivation of students in academic setting, particularly sense of belonging among students plays vital in completing the tasks in time. The study investigates the influence of humor styles which is considered to be a effective pro social element instrumenting the students sense of belonging in the academic environment. The roots of Humor studies has its origin from the 20^th century with the ongoing interest of psychologists from the domains of individual differences (Nicholas A. Kuliper, 1998).Sense of humor is considered largely a stable personality trait rather than being a single dimension. There are studies which shows the relationship with sense of humor to several domains in the field of positive psychology which significantly contributes to various factors such as wellbeing, cognitive ability, aesthetic response, an habitual behavior pattern, an emotion related temperament trait, an attitude, a coping strategy or defensive mechanism. Pertinent to the current study the humor style influence among business students in response to the sense of belonging are aimed to be identified. Sense of belonging refers to an individual's experience which makes them to be an integral part in the system or environment(Hagerty et al., 1992). Notably study made in Canadian school students of grade 6 and grade 8 shows results that sense of belonging is largely affected with the physical conditions and mental health rather less by family conditions and individual characteristics(Ma, 2003). Further exploring the variable in the domain of business students helps us to understand the psychological and pedagogical principles of personality development at the post graduate level. The grounded theories of the study includes wenger's social theory of learning forming the core learning as belonging,the theory of ritual practice(Marshall, 2002) providing means of social interaction to create a belonging state and the the relief theory of humor which holds the relief experiences from the tension removed with the humor(Meyer, 2000).

Literature Review

There are studies which investigated the students sense of belonging at the undergraduate level the results showing significant associations between students sense of class belonging and their academic self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and task value. The association between students sense of belonging and social acceptance have been proven(Freeman et al., 2007).Specific to business students there are not much literature evidences focusing towards sense of belonging. Few studies states there is a significant correlation with students sense of belonging considering the students demographics and Faculty empowerment, Faculty encouragement and Faculty interest(Whitten et al., 2017).Further studies shows that humor styles contribution to the post graduate students sense of belonging, specifically self-enhancing humor increases the sense of belonging among the students(Mohd Sukor et al., 2019). Humor is the basic element of human interaction, it creates positive emotions and amuses communication. Organizational humor has multi dimension and there is a cognitive role in perceiving the initiator's intention and behavior. Studies shows the different dimensions of humor such as affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, Mildaggressive humor, self-defeating humor are helpful in achieving different set of outcomes. It acts as a stress reduction agent and helps in group cohesiveness. Further studies shows that humor can aid in establishing leadership and maintaining hierarchical relationships(Romero & Cruthirds, 2006).

Student Identity, engagement, motivation largely depends on the degree to which they feel belonged. Sense of belonging have been explored among the international post graduate business students and the results shows that creating a learning environment that valued student diversity demanded self-reflection and creative thinking aided transition of students in post graduate education(Matheson & Sutcliffe, 2018).Findings suggests that students tends to develop sense of belonging by week 7 of semester one but an average of 10-15% of students do not develop any sense of belonging in every institution further active participation in curriculum is highly correlated with the sense of belonging(Kane et al., 2014).

Hypotheses

H1 Affiliative humour will positively influence the sense of belonging.

H2 Self-enhancing humour will positively influence the sense of belonging.

H3 Aggressive humour will negatively influence the sense of belonging.

H4 Self-defeating humour will negatively influence the sense of belonging.

Methodology

In order to fill in the lack of research on humour styles behavior and its influence on business school students, the target population of this study was the business school students in Bangalore. The samples were selected using simple random sampling. This is a cross-sectional study which applied quantitative methods by distributing questionnaires to collect data. The survey packet may take about 10 minutes to complete. The questionnaires were distributed through google form. In total, 102 returned questionnaires were completely answered by the participants. The Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) was used to measure the humour styles among business school students. This instrument was developed by Martin et al. (2003). It measures four humour styles such as affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating humour. The higher the score of each subscale, the greater the person identifies that particular dimension with their respective environment (Hester, 2010). The score of answer ranging from totally disagree (1) to totally agree (5). HSQ consists of 32- items with each question being self-descriptive statement of respondent's particular uses of humour. The Psychological Sense of Belonging (SOBI-P) was used to measure student's sense of belonging to the business school. This instrument has 18-items that employed 5-point scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). It measured the psychological experience of valued involvement in a system or environment (Reilly & Fitzpatrick, 2009). The descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistic (multiple regression) were conducted to achieve the research objectives.

Results

Table 1

One-Way ANOVA and Descriptive Statistics of Variable (Sense of Belonging on brought up place)