Network Structure of Affective Communication and Shared Emotion in Teams

Abstract

This paper identifies the relative effectiveness of two mechanisms of emotional contagion on shared emotion in teams: explicit mechanism (active spreading of one’s emotion) and implicit mechanism (passive mimicry of others’ emotion). Using social network analysis, this paper analyzes affective communication networks involving or excluding a focal person in the process of emotional contagion by disaggregating team emotional contagion into individual acts of sending or receiving emotion-laden responses. Through an experiment with 38 pre-existing work teams, including undergraduate or MBA project teams and teams of student club or co-op officers, we found that the explicit emotional contagion mechanism was a more stable channel for emotional contagion than the implicit emotional contagion mechanism. Active participation in affective communication, measured by outdegree centrality in affective communication networks, was positively and significantly associated with emotional contagion with other members. In contrast, a team member’s passive observation of humor, measured by ego network density, led to emotional divergence when all other members engaged in humor communication. Our study sheds light on the micro-level process of emotional contagion. The individual-level process of emotional convergence varies with the relational pattern of affective networks, and emotion contagion in teams depends on the interplay of the active expresser and the passive spectator in affective networks.

HR Managers’ Emotions in Strategic Decision-Making Events: Evidence from Croatia

“…Most intensely experienced emotion during negatively appraised strategic problem-solving is frustration and for strategic planning-disappointment. Those intensely experienced emotions may cross over to employees [11][12][13][14]16] and consequently influence their motivation, performance, communication, and organization climate. Neutrally appraised strategic events reveal lower average intensities of emotions than positively and negatively appraised, as expected.…”

“…Nowadays, business environment provokes more strategic problem-solving events, whichgiven the findings-present emotionally turbulent events and relate to job satisfaction. Hence, the question of managers' emotions becomes ever more current, because its consequences affect both the managers (i.e., their health and job satisfaction) and the organization (i.e., emotion crossover, communication, performance, strategy implementation [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]) and consequently-directly or indirectly, the organizational sustainability [18][19][20][21][22]. While this paper does not prove direct relationship of emotions in strategic decision-making to different aspects of organization sustainability, given the previous research, the theoretical and contextual deduction of such relationship is plausible [20][21][22].…”

“…HR managers emotional expressions could be important because employees interpret these expressions as important stimuli. The experienced emotions in such events are important in terms of health consequences [9,10], emotion crossover [11][12][13], communication [14,15], performance [16], strategy implementation [17], and organization sustainability [18][19][20][21][22].…”

Psychometric Properties of an Emotional Communication Questionnaire for Education and Healthcare Professionals

“…One example is the Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES), which analyses explicit emotional expressions and more subtle emotional cues [44]. Another example was one conducted by Rhee, Park, and Bae [45], developing ad hoc categories to analyse affective interactions in work teams. Guaita [46] also constructed an observation protocol on the emotional aspects of communication from which he extracted three styles of emotional communication: the expressive style, in which expressive components predominate; the normative style with mainly emotional control components; the assertive style, in which emotion regulation components predominate.…”