I’ve written previously about the way emotions tend to spread virally throughout an organization. Two recent studies further explore this topic, with one highlighting how negative emotions can spread, whilst the other looks at more positive emotions.

The first, from Tel Aviv University looks at how rudeness can quickly spread through a work team, undermining performance as it goes.

The spread of rudeness

“Relatively benign forms of incivility among medical staff members — simple rudeness — have robust implications on medical team collaboration processes and thus on their performance as a team,” the authors say. “This is important because rudeness is rampant in many medical contexts. Patients and their families may be rude to caregivers, and caregivers may be rude to one another.”

The research saw 24 hospital teams participate in an exercise with an ‘expert’ chiming in via a live video link. For half of the groups, the expert was rude, whereas the other half were joined by a more neutral observer.

All of the teams were monitored by a group of management experts who evaluated the performance of each team on things such as collaboration and overall performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the teams with the abusive observer underperformed compared to their peers.

Going the extra mile

A second study explored just how contagious high effort levels proved to be. It found that if you’re sat next to, or near to, someone that’s putting in a lot of mental effort, you’re likely to see your own efforts intensify also.

The Belgian study saw participants tested to see the influence their neighbors had on their performance.

They were asked to complete what’s known as the “Simon task” in pairs. When two of the four possible colours of square appeared, the person sat to the left of the screen was required to press the ‘d’ keyboard key as fast as possible with their left hand. When either of the two other possible coloured squares appeared, the person on the right was required to press the ‘k’ key as fast as possible with their right hand.

Success is gaged through speed and error rate, and although there was no requirement for collaboration between the pairs, ones partner had a profound impact on performance.

When the task for one of the participants was made artificially harder, their extra mental effort seemed to spill over into their partner.

When someone played the game alongside a partner who was forced to try harder, they performed much better on the task than they ordinarily would.

When the researchers delved deeper to explore why this was, it emerged that it wasn’t due to simply copying their partner. Whilst the reasons weren’t overly evident, the authors contend that posture could have played a part.

They suggest that when we see those around us adopting the kind of posture that depicts intense concentration, this then influences our own behavior.