Coping and Laughing Through Broken Promises: How Emotion and Humor Sustain Creativity

What is it about?

This study explores how employees maintain creativity when they feel their employer has broken promises—a situation known as psychological contract breach. Such breaches drain emotional and motivational energy, often leading employees to disengage from innovative or proactive behavior. The research applies Conservation of Resources (COR) theory to explain that when people experience resource loss (like trust or fairness), they are less willing or able to take the risks involved in being creative. Using survey data from employees in Mexico’s automotive sector, the study finds that feeling betrayed by one’s employer significantly reduces creativity. Yet two personal skills—emotion regulation and humor—help protect creative motivation. Employees who manage emotions under stress or use humor to reframe challenges are less affected by contract breach. Emotion regulation restores focus for problem-solving, while humor provides emotional distance, resilience, and connection with colleagues. The study also situates these effects in the Mexican cultural context, marked by collectivism and high power distance, where open emotional expression and group harmony shape coping styles. Even when organizations fail to uphold commitments, employees can sustain creative performance through personal coping resources that replenish emotional energy.

Featured Image

Photo by Marcel Petzold on Unsplash

Photo by Marcel Petzold on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study is unique in showing how employees’ emotional and social capacities safeguard creativity when organizations break promises. Grounded in Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, it demonstrates that emotion regulation and humor help protect and restore psychological resources when contract breaches threaten motivation and focus. Rather than seeing creativity as dependent on support, the study reframes it as adaptive coping—using control and humor to turn frustration into problem-solving energy and expression. The study is timely amid growing organizational uncertainty and the erosion of psychological contracts. In such settings, employees depend more on personal resilience to remain creative. Conducted in Mexico, where collectivist and hierarchical norms influence emotional expression, it shows that emotion regulation restores stability and humor builds social bonds, enabling innovation despite disappointment. The findings stress that sustaining creativity requires nurturing emotional and social resources that keep employees engaged and resilient.