Leader Humor and Frontline Employee Work Engagement: A Serial Mediation Model via Job Crafting and Work Meaningfulness, Moderated by Organizational Identification

Background: Drawing on conservation of resources theory (COR), this study investigates how leader humor promotes frontline employee work engagement through the serial mediating roles of job crafting and work meaningfulness, with organizational identification as a boundary condition. Method: A three-wave questionnaire survey was conducted among 575 frontline employees in China’s oil and gas service sector. Data were collected at three time points to mitigate common method bias, and Mplus and SPSS were used to test the measurement model and hypotheses. Results: The results indicate that leader humor positively predicts frontline employee work engagement. Job crafting and work meaningfulness mediate this relationship respectively and jointly produce a significant serial mediation effect. Organizational identification positively moderates both the effect of work meaningfulness on work engagement and the overall chained mediation effect. Conclusions: These findings extend conservation of resources theory by revealing a proactive “resource creation” pathway from leader humor to employee engagement, complementing prior research emphasizing passive resource reception. The results also suggest that organizational identification facilitates the transformation of work meaningfulness into work engagement, offering practical implications for cultivating leader humor and strengthening organizational identification to sustain engagement.