Network Structure of Affective Communication and Shared Emotion in Teams

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.

Intragroup Emotion Convergence: Beyond Contagion and Social Appraisal

Mimicry-based emotion contagion and social appraisal currently provide the most popular explanations for interpersonal emotional convergence. However, neither process fully accounts for intragroup effects involving dynamic calibration of people’s orientations during communal activities. When group members are engaged in shared tasks, they simultaneously attend to the same unfolding events and arrive at mutually entrained movement patterns that facilitate emotional coordination. Entrainment may be further cultivated by interaction rituals involving rhythmic music that sets the pace for collective singing, dancing, or marching. These rituals also provide an emotionally meaningful focus for group activities and sometimes specifically encourage the experience of intense embodied states. Intragroup emotion convergence thus depends on interlocking processes of reciprocated and context-attuned orientational calibration and group-based social appraisal.

No sympathy for the devil: Emotions and the social construction of the democratic peace

Constructivists claim that the democratic peace is socially constructed via mutual recognition between liberal subjects. Mutual recognition is rooted in shared moral attitudes and cognitive perceptions, thereby creating liberal intersubjectivity. What is largely missing from these accounts is the fact that shared meanings and identities are not solely rooted in cognitive perceptions and moral attitudes but significantly depend upon shared emotions that underpin and reproduce intersubjectivity. Building on interdisciplinary insights from social constructivist emotion theories, it is argued here that collectively shared emotions provide a way by which liberal subjects choose particular meaning frames and interpretations, which help align and sustain mutual attitudes and perceptions in constructing categories of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Accordingly, the theoretical question concerning how liberal democracies recognize each other as friends can be more fully answered by the high degree of emotional convergence among them. Moreover, I suggest that it is precisely this emotional convergence that underpins the way liberal selves construct non-liberal others as their enemies.

Emotional Convergence in Service Relationships

The literature establishes that customer and frontline employee (FLE) emotions converge during their encounters as a result of a transient, contagion-based process in which emotions flow from one actor to another. Recent evidence suggests, however, that this transient process does not produce emotional convergence among frontline dyads engaged in ongoing exchange, a surprising finding, given the wealth of evidence in support of the idea that customers and FLEs engaged in relational exchange strongly influence one another. In light of this evidence, we argue here that customers and FLEs engaged in ongoing exchange experience similar emotions not as a result of the transient transfer of emotions, but because they develop the tendency to undergo a similar emotional response to relationship events, a phenomenon we call the shared frontline experience. Informed by the social psychology literature, we support this idea by advancing a conceptual model that highlights the role of relationship closeness, personality similarity, and dyadic attachment style in producing the shared frontline experience. The proposed model also suggests that firms stand to benefit from the shared frontline experience of customers and FLEs if they provide the dyad with autonomy, a decision not without risk. Future research directions suggested by this perspective are discussed.