In this DFG-funded project, scholars from the University of Passau and University of Augsburg take the unique opportunity to join their respective perspectives and complementary capabilities to address the overarching question of “How, why, and under which circumstances does executive humor affect team processes and team performance, and how can (executive) humor be measured on a large scale by applying automatic multimodal recognition approaches?”.
As the first research project at this intersection of research fields to date, the applicants, Andreas König,  Professor of Strategic Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Passau, and Björn Schuller, Professor of  Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing at the University of Augsburg, are combining their domains of expertise and complementary competencies in the fields of management and computerized psychometry to address these research gaps.

Scholarly understanding of humor in organizations is still substantially limited, largely because research in this domain has primarily been qualitative, survey-based, and small scale. Notably, recent advances in computerized psychometry promise to provide unique tools to deliver unobtrusive, multi-faceted, ad hoc measures of humor that are free from the substantial limitations associated with traditional humor measures. Computerized psychometry scholars have long noted that a computerized understanding of humor is essential for the humanization of artificial intelligence. Yet, they have struggled to automatically identify, categorize, and reproduce humor. In particular, computerized approaches have suffered not only from a lack of theoretical foundations but also from a lack of complex, annotated, real-life datasets and multimodal measures that consider the multi-faceted, contextual nature of humor. This can help shed light on what potential effects executive humor can have on team performance as well as external social evaluations, like reputation. We combine our areas of expertise to address these research gaps and complementary needs in our fields.
Specifically, we substantially advance computerized measures of humor and provide a unique view into the contextualized implications of executive humor, drawing on the empirical context of professional soccer. Despite initial attempts to join computerized psychometry and management, these two fields have not yet been successfully combined to address our overall research question. We aspire to fill this void as equal partners, united by our keen interest in humor, computerized psychometry, executive rhetoric, social evaluations, and team performance.