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

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

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Other contextual issues that should be explored in the future include specific organizational situations in which contagion may be particularly pervasive, such as in customer service or care-giving. For instance, customer service jobs may be very stressful, not only because of overt conflict but because of the continuous low-grade effect of catching customers' negative moods, particularly in service jobs in which many of the interactions involve some sort of problem or negative feedback. This negative contagion can lead to long-term burnout in a sales environment (Verbeke, 1997) or in healthcare jobs in which healthcare providers are in constant contact with people who are ill or depressed (Omdahl and O'Donnell, 1999). Moreover, the contagion process can work in the opposite direction as well: if a customer service worker is in a bad mood, he or she may transfer this negativity to the customer, leading the customer to feel dissatisfied, even if the employee was successful in the cognitive aspects of the encounter (Pugh, 2001). As implied by these findings, emotional contagion may not always have positive effects. Sometimes one does not want to catch the emotions of others, particularly if they are negative or if one needs to maintain emotional equilibrium (e.g., Milner, Halsey, and Fultz, 1996).

In this study, I focused on the mainly subconscious processes involved in being a recipient of emotional contagion, but an interesting research area is the deliberate use of emotional contagion in many organizational culture, socialization, and leadership processes. Leaders in general, and charismatic or transformational leaders especially (e.g., Conger, 1989), make particularly strong and explicit use of emotions. For example, when Lou Gerstner was brought in as the chief executive officer of IBM, he recognized the importance of the transfer of emotions in leading organizations when he talked about the culture change needed at IBM and stated, "It's not something you do by writing memos. You've got to appeal to people's emotions. They've got to buy in with their hearts and their bellies, not just their minds" (Lohr, 1994:1). On a more day-to-day and perhaps less conscious level, there is empirical evidence showing that leaders' and managers' positive work moods are positively associated with employees' work performance (George, 1995) and that people are attracted to emotionally expressive others (Friedman, Riggio, and Casella, 1988).

With regard to organizational culture and socialization, some organizational cultures, particularly sales cultures, use emotional contagion as a conscious corporate culture strategy. For example, Mary Kay Cosmetics focuses on the transfer of enthusiasm and uses songs, recognition dinners, and national meetings in which positive emotions are intentionally spread (Ash, 1981). The AMWAY Corporation not only uses emotional contagion to further its business practices, it even has a name for it: "positive programming." This positive programming involves the company constantly exhorting its members to stay positive and to transfer that positivity to others (Pratt, 2000).