The contagious leader: behavioural and physiological measures of emotional contagion in organizational settings

The transmission of moods and emotions in organizations influences many work-related outcomes. Studies indicate that leaders’ affective states can propagate to their followers, with important consequences on well-being and performance. Leadership style may further modulate this phenomenon, with transformational leaders (i.e., those who "inspire" their collaborators to continuously improve for their own well-being and for the good of the organization) more likely to use emotions as communicative tools. However, the biological correlates of emotional contagion in organizations are underexplored. To address this issue, here we examined emotional contagion dynamics in organizations combining behavioural and psychophysiological methods. In Experiment 1, 28 managers (“leaders”) and 92 employees (“followers”) from a financial consulting company were asked to give a brief speech imagining convincing someone to join the company, while being recorded with a video camera. During the speech, participants’ heart rate, electrodermal activity and face temperature were also recorded. The presence of emotional facial expressions displayed during the speech is investigated through an AI-based software. In Experiment 2, the same participants are presented with the speech videos recorded in Experiment 1. Leader-to-follower and follower-to-leader contagion is quantified as the time-lagged synchronization between the speakers’ and the observers’ time series of physiological and facial expressions data. Preliminary results from Experiment 1 indicate that, although leaders displayed less happy and more neutral expressions during the speech compared to followers, transformational leadership scores correlated with the frequency and intensity of happy expressions. Thus, transformational leaders indeed appear more inclined towards the nonverbal display of positive emotions.