Don’t you tweet me badly: Anxiety contagion between leaders and followers in computer-mediated communication during COVID-19

Abstract

Do organizational leaders’ tweets influence their employees’ anxiety? And if so, have employees become more susceptible to their leader’s social media communications during the COVID-19 pandemic? Based on emotional contagion and using machine learning algorithms to track anxiety and personality traits of 197 leaders and 958 followers across 79 organizations over 316 days, we find that during the pandemic leaders’ tweets do influence follower state anxiety. In addition, followers of trait anxious leaders seem somewhat protected by sudden spikes in leader state anxiety, while followers of less trait anxious leaders are most affected by increased leader state anxiety. Multi-day lagged regressions showcase that this effect is stronger post-onset of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic crisis context.

Is it too late now to say we’re sorry? Examining anxiety contagion and crisis communication strategies using machine learning

“…This is likely due to the personification of organizations and brands, which results in customers and the public alike expecting human-like qualities when corresponding with these organizations. This supports previous work which found that emotions are easily transferred on social media between leaders to followers via social media interactions [ 10 ]. And given that emotions expressed on social media, in particular negative emotions, can trigger the viral sharing of content [ 10 ], we emphasize that the emotional experiences of the public should not be ignored in favor of less complex categorizations such as positive or negative valence.…”

“…The importance of the study of the transfer of anxiety from individuals to others [ 9 ] or from leaders to followers in organizations [ 10 ] has been well established. However, we argue that the study of the transfer of anxiety from organizations to the public is underdeveloped and warrents further investigation.…”

“…Importantly, affect describes a term comprising all aspects of subjective feelings, including emotions, moods, and subjective feelings in general [ 19 ]. As stated by Gruda, et al [ 10 ], “[i]f person A is successful in transferring their emotions to person B, person B non-consciously imitates the communicated affect, which leads to convergence in both interaction partners’ emotions” (p. 2).…”

“…While most works have examined the role and importance of emotional contagion in explaining the transfer of emotions from individuals to others in face-to-face interactions [for a review see 17 ], several studies have shown that emotional contagion also can occur in online interactions, for example from leaders to followers [ 10 , 11 ]. Interestingly, in line with previous research on face-to-face interactions, negative emotions are more likely to spread via CMC on social media platforms (in particular) compared to positive emotions [ 7 , 20 , 21 ].…”

Time After Time: Attachment Orientations and Impression Formation in Initial and Longer-Term Team Interactions

“…However, we acknowledge that the presented study should be viewed as exploratory, and we encourage future research to study team member interactions on a larger scale. It would be interesting for example, to see whether similar patterns of interpersonal perception and behavior across time are evident in virtual teams due to ease of data collection with the use of machine learning algorithms to study team member interactions online ( Gruda and Ojo, 2021 , 2022 ; Gruda et al, 2021 , 2022 ).…”