Leadership under pressure, Why Emotions can be contagious

By Emilia Paolino, Paolo Gallo, Massimo Magni

Leadership under pressure.

We have suddenly and unexpectedly found ourselves living a very unusual situation: half of the world’s population is in isolation, all sporting and cultural events have been canceled, the stock markets have slumped by 30% and there has been a considerable fall in spending. It has all happened abruptly, and we have all reacted with different emotions, with the understanding that we have to get used to a new routine. From an emotional perspective, we are all are facing intense and difficult circumstances.

The management of our emotional moods has now become a crucial factor not just for us, but also for those around us, in both our private and professional lives. If we happen to have the additional responsibility of managing a team, then the importance of managing emotions becomes particularly critical, because our emotions are contagious and they can easily be transmitted to others, especially when the physical distance between us is increased.

The inability of a leader to manage emotional pressure, combined with a high degree of diversity of team members, can lead to destructive scenarios in which team collaboration descends into interpersonal conflicts, mutual accusations and the erosion of trust. When something like this occurs, we find ourselves confronted with a team that has lost its most vital asset: the sharing of ideas and different points of view.

Leaders’ emotions are not just personal to them; they impact on the professional sphere of those around them. Therefore, it is vitally important that leaders learn to digest emotional pressure, both for their own and their teams’ well-being.

A leader with a mask?

A study undertaken by SDA Bocconi, involving more than 1,000 participants and their team leaders, shows how the ability of the leader to manage their own emotions is crucial, and how the leader’s strategies to control these emotions has an impact both on the team and the leader themselves.

This ability of the leader does not consist of avoiding making their own emotions visible to others; rather, it involves their ability to manage these emotions in an effective way, according to the situation the team is facing.

Strategies known to regulate personal emotions typically take two forms: the masking approach and the replacing approach. The masking approach involves someone hiding their own personal moods by exhibiting only what is demanded by the situation, but without changing the actual emotional state. In other words, when using this approach, the leader dons a “mask” to disguise their emotions.

On the other hand, the replacing approach is based on the trasformation of personal feelings and the interiorization of emotions that seem to be more appropriate to a specific situation. In other words, when using this approach, leaders try to modify their own emotions in order to align them with the expectations demanded by a specific situation.

The results that have emerged from research indicate that a masking strategy has a positive effect on the ability of the team to remain calm in a learning environment, and to maintain focus on its goals. With masking, the leader seeks to prevent the team from living in a climate of emotional escalation. In a difficult situation, to witness that the leader is being emotionally affected by the unfavourable context can lead to a contagious effect, one which could potentially disrupt the efficacy of processes and the mood within the team.

In other words, the leader wears a mask in order to focus on the here and now, so that other members of the team are able to keep calm and collected. On the one hand, an emotional contagion can lead to consequences that are desirable when the leader’s emotional disposition is positive; on the other, a negative emotional contagion can lead to particularly harmful consequences for the team.

A leader who adopts a masking strategy practises a form of emotional quarantine, in which they are mindful of any frustration and disappointment felt, and where they also work to contain the diffusion of a negative climate within the team.

Whilst the masking strategy may have a positive impact on the results of the team, it may nevertheless generate tensions within the leader themseleves from an emotional perspective, because of a lack of authenticity in the way in which they are behaving. Such behaviour is not sustainable in the long term. Research into organizational well-being has shown that individuals who suppress their emotions at work experience a 32% increase in their stress levels.

Moreover, negative effects for the leader are evident not only in terms of their own personal well-being, but are also in their performance. Research shows that the adoption of masking strategies leads to a 13% deterioration in team performance, and a 17% decrease in the leader’s ability to read contexts and act lucidly. As regards the strategy of replacing, the results reveal a rather counter-intuitive picture.

The adoption of replacing has been shown to have no impact on the team’s ability to maintain a positive atmosphere, which is conducive to the accomplishment of results. Firstly, the process of replacing takes time. What is more, the efforts that the leader makes to try to modify their own personal feelings in a difficult situation are largely internal, and consequently less effective in the external environment, and hence for the team.

The results are even more intriguing if we examine the effect of the replacing strategy on the leader themselves. Any such attempt by the leader to change their own personal disposition from an emotional perspective has been shown to be responsible for a 19% increase in their ability to find new development models.

These results seem to outline a scenario in which the leader is able to accurately read the context in which they are operating, and accordingly calibrate their own emotions. For example, in the short term, and in order to face emergent situations, the leader can adopt a masking approach to avoid any contagion of negative emotions and to maintain the team’s focus on the team’s goals. This strategy cannot be sustained in the long term because of the negative effects on the leader themselves. Thus, with the passing of time, the leader may try experimenting with a replacing strategy, such that their awareness of, and ability to manage, emotions are enhanced.

Training to manage emotions.

The results of this research have highlighted that there is no one best way to efficiently manage emotional pressure. Furthermore, they suggest that the leader has to act according to a contingent logic, i.e. they have to be mindful not only of their own emotions, but also of the environment in which they are operating. But how can the leader efficiently manage the emotional pressure they are experiencing?

Feel. Most managers regard emotions as something negligible, but research shows that emotions are crucial to explaining human behaviour. Therefore, the leader needs to learn how to recognize their own emotions and to understand the consequences for both their own team and themselves.

Read. The results of the research underline that the leader does not only have to accept their own emotional disposition, but that they also have to be able to read the context in which these emotions were born. This internal awareness enables the leader to recognize which strategies to enact in order to manage their emotions, while their external awareness works to implement the most coherent emotional strategy for the context.

Train. The final element that can support the leader is that of enhancing their own ability to manage emotions. For example, as previously mentioned, training one’s own capacity to replace can be useful in the long term in reducing the negative effects linked to the strategy of masking. The leader has to refine their ability to recognize their own emotions, as well as the impact these emotions can have on others.

These three elements become even more crucial when teams are geographically dispersed. The isolation we are currently experiencing requires even more responsibiity on the part of leaders; a negative emotional contagion may impact not only on one’s own colleagues, but also on one’s family, by creating an escalation of tensions.

Emilia Paolino, SDA Bocconi Fellow

Paolo Gallo, Executive Coach, Author, Adjunct Professor Bocconi University

Massimo Magni, Professor Bocconi e SDA Bocconi

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