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Continued from previous page
Proving the Ripple Effect
Several years ago, Barsade found substantial evidence of
this ripple effect in an experiment involving business students
engaged in a group decision-making exercise. Barsade's team
videotaped and analyzed the interactions of four groups of
students acting as managers trying to agree on how to divvy
up a fixed sum of bonus money among their employees, with
each manager arguing on behalf of his or her own candidate.
Unbeknownst to the participants, each group contained
a confederate—a drama student named Rick who'd been
specially trained to act out a different mood and energy level
with each group. The result: even though his requests were
the same with all the groups, the participants acted differently
in direct response to Rick's mood in their group. In the
two groups where he exuded negativity, the other participants
took on his bad mood—and behaved less cooperatively.
And when he acted calm and happy, the rest of that
group was pleasant and cooperative.
"I was in the room," recalls Barsade, "and it was palpable: you
could just see the emotions being transferred among the students."
This result wasn't unexpected: over a decade of research
has shown evidence of social contagion, and some of the
groundbreaking findings made it into Malcolm Gladwell's
bestseller The Tipping Point. But even Barsade was surprised
by at least one result from her own study: positive emotions
were as contagious as negative ones. In fact, in the two groups
where Rick acted in low-energy ways, his good mood proved
more contagious than his bad mood. That low-energy/positive
group, apparently influenced by Rick's demeanor, actually
suggested giving him more money than he'd asked for. (And
even months after the experiment, when fellow participants
would pass Rick in a Wharton building where he was taking
one class, they would treat him differently depending upon
the mood he'd acted out in their group.) Barsade's conclusion:
positive and negative emotions are contagious, and the more
positive the emotion the more cooperation and less conflict.
Part of what's interesting about this experiment is that even
though the participants were clearly influenced by Rick's mood,
none of them seemed aware of what had gone on. In fact, in a
post-negotiation multiple-choice survey, everybody connected
their personal effectiveness in the negotiation with other factors:
nobody seemed to think that their decisions had anything to do
with their mood or the mood of others in the room.
Subconscious Reactions
Have Measurable Impact
Such obliviousness to the ways emotions affect our
thoughts and actions is typical, Barsade says, as emotional
decision-making often occurs on a subconscious level. In one
study looking at how emotions influenced the hiring of customer
service workers for an HMO, she and professor Lorna
Doucet of the University of Illinois found that the strongest
predictor of somebody's being hired or passed over was not
the resume or any other factor; it was the candidate's susceptibility
to emotional contagion. The greater a candidate's
propensity toward emotional contagion, the less likely he or
she was to be rated highly and to be hired. And the interviewers
didn't seem to know that they were rating candidates
according to that criterion. "Here's an emotional tendency
that people are picking up on that they're not necessarily
aware they're picking up on," Barsade says.
But it's not just that people made subconscious, gut-level
hiring decisions. In this case, the emotional decisions actually
made a lot of sense. After all, it's very reasonable that workers
hired to answer calls from irate customers cannot be as effective
if they're overly swayed by the emotions of others. In
fact, the ability to stay even-tempered in such circumstances
might be more important to success in this job than any
seemingly more rational, objective factor. As Barsade puts
it, "It might seem irrational, but for the organization it ultimately
makes sense."
Many of the dynamics of social contagion are still a mystery.
For example, if both positive and negative emotions are
contagious, what determines which emotion prevails in a given
group? Do managers and other leaders have much emotional
influence on their followers—or are they, as some
research suggests, actually more susceptible to emotional
contagion than the typical group member? At least one thing
is certain, Barsade says: "Whenever we interact with people,
we're constantly exchanging mood back and forth." And as
the negotiation study showed, even just one person can start
an emotional wave that ripples throughout a group. Through
enough influential individuals, an organization can develop
an emotional culture that has rippled out through people
feeling and conveying either positive or negative emotions.
Some organizations understand the power of emotions in
the workplace and actively foster a positive emotional culture.
Barsade says that Mary Kay Cosmetics encourages "positive programming."
Similarly, the professor cites a Southwest Airlines ad
that suggests the employees' positive spirit rubs off on customers.
That kind of culture may well attract a certain kind of personality.
Barsade describes a videotape of Southwest's former
VP of Human Resources Elizabeth Sartain talking about what
drew her to the airline. Her boss at her previous company had
once chided her for laughing loudly in the hallway, saying
it was unprofessional to be "cackling" in that way. Not so at
Southwest, Sartain said, where she could laugh with abandon.
By calling her laughter unprofessional, the old boss was
clearly expressing his company's norm about emotional expression.
(Barsade points out that, oddly enough, more companies
are comfortable with expressions of anger than of joy, according
to one study.) But the incident also illustrates another area
of Barsade's research: emotional diversity among coworkers.
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