The ripple effect: emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Sigal G. Barsade

Understanding shared social processes in groups is becoming increasingly important as firms move toward a greater team orientation. These shared social processes can serve as a conduit for a variety of group interactions and dynamics important to getting work done. Interestingly, research on the influence of shared social processes has focused almost exclusively on its cognitive aspects--how ideas and cognition are shared among group members. This can be seen in the social-information processing literature, which focuses on how people are influenced by the cognitions and attitudes of others in their social environment (e.g., Salancik and Pfeifer, 1978; Bateman, Griffin, and Rubinstein, 1987; Shetzer, 1993), as well as in research examining shared social cognitions, which also focuses exclusively on the process through which people construct and share thoughts, ideas, and memories (e.g., Moreland, Argote, and Krishnan, 1996; Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 2001).

While understanding how people share ideas adds to the knowledge of group dynamics, it does not give a complete picture. One also needs to take into account the sharing of emotions, or emotional contagion, that occurs in groups. The importance of emotions in organizational behavior, particularly at the individual level, has been solidly established (see Brief and Weiss, 2002, for a review), and researchers have begun to turn their attention toward understanding the processes and outcomes of collective emotion (see Barsade and Gibson, 1998; Kelly and Barsade, 2001; George, 2002, for reviews). Some theorists have gone so far as to say that "feelings may be the way group entities are known" (Sande-lands and St. Clair, 1993: 445) and that the development of group emotion is what defines a group and distinguishes it from merely a collection of individuals.

Implicit attention has been paid to collective emotion in the organizational behavior literature, with many organizational processes grounded in such affective relations of group members as morale, cohesion, and rapport (Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal, 1987). The advancement of the emotions literature in psychology has also allowed for a more focused and explicit examination of collective emotion. George and colleagues showed that not only do group emotions exist, but these emotions, which they call group affective tone, can influence work outcomes (George, 1989, 1990; George and Brief, 1992). In a study of senior management teams, Barsade et al. (2000) found that a group's affective diversity, another way of conceptualizing group emotion, also had an effect on individual attitudes and team dynamics. But the question remains, what is the process by which these effects occur?

While literature on shared cognitions can provide some insight into how collective emotions occur via emotional contagion, there are some important differences between emotional and cognitive contagion. First, the transfer of ideas is qualitatively different from the transfer of feelings. Words are central to understanding ideas yet are least important in understanding emotions, for which nonverbal cues are primary (Mehrabian, 1972). Because of the importance of these nonverbal cues, direct interpersonal contact is important for the transmission of emotions in groups. Conversely, sharing cognitions need not occur face to face (Ilgen and Klein, 1988). There are also some differences in the amount of effortful processing involved in cognitive and emotional contagion. Although emotional contagion can contain elements of purposeful processing found in cognitive contagion--such as the evaluation, interpretation, expectation, and personal goals found in the sharing of ideas (Salancik and Pfeifer, 1978)--emotional contagion research studies show that emotional contagion most often occurs at a significantly less conscious level, based on automatic processes and physiological responses (e.g., Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1994; Neumann and Strack, 2000).

Organizational and psychological researchers have begun to investigate the question of emotional contagion through field studies examining mood convergence in work teams. In a field setting, Totterdell et al. (1998) found evidence that the moods of teams of nurses and accountants were related to each other even after controlling for shared work problems. Totterdell (2000) found the same results in professional cricket teams, controlling for the team's status in the game. In a study of meetings of 70 very diverse work groups, Bartel and Saavedra (2000) also found evidence of mood convergence. Similar to Totterdell and colleagues, Bartel and Saavedra showed that work-group mood is something that can be recognized and reliably measured by members in the work group, as well as by observers external to the group. Barrel and Saavedra also examined antecedents to the mood convergence processes and found positive relationships between mood convergence and stable membership in the group, norms about mood regulation in the group, and task and social interdependence. In Totterdell's studies, being older, along with a complex of factors related to being interdependent and satisfied with the team (i.e., more committed to the team, perceiving a better team climate, being happier and engaging in collective activity) were antecedents to mood congruence.