I was recently speaking with someone who runs a successful 40-person business. Until recently, it had been a highly productive, generally problem-free environment.
Then one day in a meeting an employee made a negative comment about a relatively minor aspect of the company's benefit program that had never before been a problem. (I've changed a few details here to protect the company's privacy.) Not long after the meeting, the manager returned to his office and found that another employee just wrote him a frustrated email about the same issue. A few minutes later, yet another upset employee stopped by his office and wanted to call a staff meeting about it.
The business owner was both puzzled and disturbed. What was going on? Suddenly a business that was humming nicely along the track seemed to have been taken off the rails by a problem that, until earlier that morning, hadn't been a problem at all.
Fertile Breeding Ground
Moods of course are fluid, not static, and change readily. Furthermore, they do not exist in isolation; in a workplace environment, networks of teams, alliances, friendships, and antagonisms provide a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of emotions to circulate throughout an employee population.
Emotional contagion occurs when people, often unconsciously, mimic or pick up the feelings of others they are interacting with.
Everyone understandably has opinions and feelings about work, and those feelings (both positive and negative) are frequently shared with others. Yet the concept of "emotional contagion" is seldom discussed, or even recognized, in the business world. In nearly a quarter century of management, plus an MBA program, I never once heard the phrase mentioned.
Both Negative and Positive
Personally, I tend to think of emotional contagion in the workplace as a kind of accelerant. It amplifies feelings. It can be a positive, motivating force, as well as a negative one.
When people spend a great deal of time working together in close proximity, in a setting as important to an individual's financial and emotional well-being as work, there are usually plenty of feelings to be shared.
In the circumstance described at the outset, the sharing of feelings caused difficulties for management, since what started as one person's gripe quickly turned into a broader organizational problem. The whole became larger than the sum of its parts.
However, as a longtime employee and manager myself, I've also seen the upside to this phenomenon. I've been part of situations where employee enthusiasm for things like, say, a new, creative company advertising campaign or a generous new employee bonus program gathered momentum of its own and generated genuine, widespread positive excitement.
Bottom line: Emotional contagion is a subtle, but recognized force that both managers and employees can benefit from being aware of as they navigate the often challenging emotional landscape of the workplace.