Open AccessDon’t you tweet me badly: Anxiety contagion between leaders and followers in computer-mediated communication during COVID-19
Author(s) -
Dritjon Gruda,
Adegboyega Ojo,
Alexandros Psychogios
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0264444
Subject(s) - anxiety , context (archaeology) , pandemic , psychology , emotional contagion , crisis communication , covid-19 , social media , social psychology , state (computer science) , personality , political science , public relations , medicine , psychiatry , computer science , biology , paleontology , disease , pathology , algorithm , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law
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.