Background. The address to facilitating practice means granting to the person of a possibility of constructing individual sense and searching for such instruments of work by the consultant which allow the clients “to go and keep the relations with others”. The issue of searching for psychotechnical means adequate to correspondent ones, and to dialogue relations, turns us to humour and one of its forms, i.e. a joke. 

Objective. Guided by the cultural and historical concept and narrative approach in psychology and also by the ideas of systematic and stage-by-stage action development we are to prove joke as a tool of narrative understanding of the interpersonal relations. 

Design. The concept of ‘interpersonal relationship’ is clarified. The features of the ‘understanding interpersonal relations’ are specified. A review of ‘laughing’ as behaviour leading to an understanding of interpersonal relations, and a joke as a psycho-technical tool mediating the therapeutic relationship between a client and a consultant, is conducted. 

Results. ‘Understanding interpersonal relationships’ is coined as highlighting a method (scheme) that leads to a judgment about the developing relationship. Humor is considered as an attitude and understanding (orientation) in interpersonal communication whose purpose occurs through a sign-symbolic construction, i.e. a joke. Considering joke in the focus of the narrative approach provides an opportunity to see additional features of it as a tool, which can be included in the outline of the indicative basis of a communicative process. 

Conclusions. Using joke in advisory interaction as psychotechnical tool allows us to make certain statements, or to call for certain behaviour from the equality position without limiting individual freedom of the person. Due to joking the consultant’s intensions, interests, valuable and semantic orientations are getting more transparent and, the client’s judgments and behavior can be corrected easily.

This article investigates the structure and functions of organizational trust, examining the content of employees’ subjective notions about organizational trust and it’s role in organization’s functioning. The combination of direct (R.B.Shaw’s trust assessment survey) and indirect (the semantic differential scale; the content-analysis of the checklist of trust structural components) methods was used. Using data on 378 employees of different organizations (commercial, medical, educational) we distinguished subjective images of organization in groups with opposite estimation of organizational trust’s level. The study indicated that organizational trust’s structure is not linear, and exposed two main functions of high level of organizational trust – idealization and positive emotional estimation both of actual organization (that is currently place of employment). Obtained data provide basis for express-diagnostic of trust in organization and might be used for design of psychological training aiming high organization’s efficacy.