Events

Prof. Jon M. Jachimowicz
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

Employees aspire to join high-passion teams, and prior research suggests such teams produce better outcomes because team members effortlessly catch each other’s passion. This view reflects an implicit assumption in the broader emotional contagion literature that emotions are easily caught. We propose that any instance of contagion comprises both effortless (easy and automatic) and effortful (conscious and directed) processes, and the prevalence of each varies with the emotional state being transmitted. Specifically, we argue that the socially valued nature of passion for work coupled with its observability lead high-passion teams to inadvertently set informal display norms. These create social pressures for employees which make effortful processes more prevalent in the contagion mix—thereby detracting from the benefits high-passion teams provide. We provide evidence through an experience sampling study with 829 employees nested in 155 teams who responded to three surveys per day across 20 consecutive workdays (16,574 responses), and a pre-registered experiment with 1,063 full-time employees. Our work reveals the challenges employees experience in high-passion teams. It also deepens our understanding of emotional contagion, highlighting that the process of catching—and the composition of how effortless versus effortful it is—holds distinct implications for outcomes above and beyond the caught emotional state.