From the desk of Nick Mills…
I’ve had loads of experience in different working environments dealing with all sorts of temperaments. Like me, you’ve probably noticed that it takes only one negative person to wreak havoc with everyone’s equilibrium. This is known as emotional contagion. Find out what you can do to to minimise it in your workplace…
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Terri checked herself in the mirror a final time before walking out the door of the serviced apartment she’d been staying in for the past month. She had recently been promoted to the role of Human Resources Manager of a medium-sized service organisation. As part of her promotion, she had been required to relocate to the nation’s capital from her home city to manage a highly engaged and functioning team that she had already been a part of for a few years. Now she was their manager.
Even though she had been in the role for just under a month and knew it was going to take a while to settle in, Terri fought hard to overcome the sense of dread that she increasingly felt each morning before arriving at the office. She knew the job was a big step up from her previous role and that it was just the challenge she had craved, and yet the settling in process had not gone to plan.
The team that reported to her had changed their tune. Previously they’d been accepting, challenging, engaged, and cohesive. Now the team members seemed outwardly hostile towards her.
Janelle, the previous manager, had been competent and charming, a ‘great manager’ over the years. Terri knew she had big shoes to fill in order to keep the team happy, motivated, and working together as well as they had been. Just now, however, that seemed all too impossible. What had changed?
At its simplest, emotional contagion refers to a set of processes which enable us to ‘catch’ another person’s emotion. It’s defined as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with those of another person, and, consequently, to converge emotionally.” Most of these processes are largely automatic, so we tend to take on the powerful feelings we feel around us.
It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although it has been demonstrated that emotional contagion can, and does, occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through emails and ‘chats’ are affected by the other’s emotions, even without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.
This in contrast to cognitive empathy, which requires you to make an explicit set of inferences in order to know what the other person is feeling or thinking. Practicing insight and working hard to be aware of one’s own feelings as well as the emotional states of others can help to keep emotional contagion at bay.
Organisational psychologists that highlight the benefits of work-teams have come to see that emotions come into play and that a group emotion is formed.
The group’s emotional state has an influence on factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team’s performance. For this reason, organisations need to take into account the factors that shape the emotional state of the work-teams, in order to harness the beneficial sides and avoid the detrimental sides of the group’s emotion. Managers and team leaders should be even more cautious with their behavior, since their emotional influence is greater than that of a ‘regular’ team member. It has been shown that leaders are more emotionally ‘contagious’ than others.
