Ricerc@Sapienza

Triggered by the 'affective revolution' in organizational behavior that started at the end of the past millenium, the last 20-year research examining the influence of affect on all aspects of organizational life has radically transformed our understanding of dyadic and team dynamics in workplaces, the leader-followers relationships, as well as the work satisfaction and attitudes of employees and customers (34).Tellingly, studies established that emotional contagion across organizational domains influences a variety of attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral/performance outcomes (34). However, most of previous research on how emotional contagion orchestrates the conscious and unconscious flow of affect from leaders to followers (and partly also from followers to leaders) was based on short-term manipulations where participants, typically University students, are artificially assigned to the role of leader or follower. Our project takes the less traveled road by: i) testing participants who belong in a specific category (i.e. women and men transformational and transactional leaders, subordinate followers who work either in-person or remotely) not because of a short-term manipulation but because of their long-term role in a given organization; ii) creating experimental paradigms for inducing emotional contagion in a naturalistic setting; iii) combining a number of physiological variables acquired with state-of-the-art methodologies (e.g. thermal imaging for testing facial expression of emotions triggered by real-life circumstances like watching positive or negative affect charged movies) with subjective reports of mood changes and measures of interindividual differences in susceptibility to contagion and personality traits modulating emotional reactivity. The high-degree of ecologicity that we expect to obtain makes our approach potentially significant for the creation of protocols in which modulation of emotional contagion may be used for translational purposes where spreading of positive emotions and control of negative ones may lead to a substantial improvement of workplace interpersonal dynamics. The current research project is high-risk as it proposes to integrate the rigorous laboratory testing that however occurs in somewhat impoverished experimental contexts with field research in distintictive situations where real work-related leader-follower dynamics are at place. In specific, the project will combine different behavioural and physiological measures collected in the laboratory (which are necessary for the comprehensive understanding of psychological and biological factors underlying emotional contagion in workplaces) with recruitment of participants who actually are leaders or followers and who do not need to pretend to play any artificially assigned roles. Although high-risk the project may also be considered high gain, as it has the potential to provide important theoretical and methodological advancements in the emerging field of psycho-physio-neuroleadership and to inspire protocols for improving well-being in both remote and in-person work contexts. The combination of novel concepts and techniques in addressing outstanding research questions raises feasibility issues. For example, being the project highly exploratory in nature some of the predictions may not be confirmed. Importantly, in most cases, even if the predictions are not confirmed (e.g. that transactional leaders fail to show high degree of contagion), novel results will be gained with the potential to increase the theoretical understanding of how emotions and affect regulate the interpersonal dynamics in ecological work contexts. Practical feasibility is guaranteed by the experience of the research team with the proposed techniques and approaches. Indeed, the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory at Sapienza University of Rome has extensive experience in the use of thermal imaging (27,28,29,35) and of autonomic physiology (36,37) and is currently running a research project on heart rate synchronization during dyadic motor interactions (38). The recruitment of the special category of participants is guaranteed by the expertise of the organizational psychology and labour law applicants and by a large company at the world frontier among professional network services (see below for additional description of the E&Y facilities).