Abstract
Do organizational leaders’ tweets influence their employees’ anxiety? And if so, have employees become more susceptible to their leader’s social media communications during the COVID-19 pandemic? Based on emotional contagion and using machine learning algorithms to track anxiety and personality traits of 197 leaders and 958 followers across 79 organizations over 316 days, we find that during the pandemic leaders’ tweets do influence follower state anxiety. In addition, followers of trait anxious leaders seem somewhat protected by sudden spikes in leader state anxiety, while followers of less trait anxious leaders are most affected by increased leader state anxiety. Multi-day lagged regressions showcase that this effect is stronger post-onset of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic crisis context.
Highlights
We examine this particular phenomenon in an exploratory manner, using an innovative ML approach to detect both state and trait anxiety [9] in a large sample of 197 leaders and 958 followers and derive 43,283 daily indications of anxiety from posts and interactions on the Twitter platform by leaders and followers over 316 days
As the use of public social media platforms is becoming more prevalent and accepted by both organizations and employees [16], we argue that more attention needs to be paid to the study of emotional contagion from leaders to followers, and its repercussions on follower affect, via CMC
Previous research has found that leaders effectively transfer emotions to their followers in face-to-face communications
Summary
Due to the state- and trait-like properties of anxiety, it is crucial to study follower anxiety over time [9]. Given that trait anxiety is traditionally measured as the frequency of anxiety experiences [9, 35], in this study trait anxiety constituted a 30 day average of anxiety scores per user, derived from available tweets before the examined period (before 5th October 2019) This provided us with approximately one month of anxiety ratings per individual (i.e., leaders and followers) in our dataset. We disregarded cases in which there were less than four posted dyads between leaders and their respective followers on the same day This threshold was identified as the bottom 10% of our dataset and was implemented to ensure data reliability on a company level.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call