Emotional Contagion Across Text-Based Workplace Communication

Alexandros Psychogios

Emotional Contagion Across Text-Based Workplace Communication

Author(s)	Alexandros Psychogios
Country	United States
Abstract	Workplace communication is increasingly conducted through email, instant messaging, team-chat channels, project-management comments, and other text-based digital systems. These communication environments remove many facial, vocal, and bodily cues traditionally associated with emotional transmission, yet the absence of such cues does not make workplace communication emotionally neutral. Experimental research has demonstrated that emotional contagion can occur in teams communicating entirely through text, while broader computer-mediated communication research indicates that written language, punctuation, message length, emoticons, response patterns, and behavioral consistency can communicate affective information. Cheshin, Rafaeli, and Bos showed that anger and happiness can spread within text-based virtual teams, extending emotional-contagion theory beyond face-to-face interaction. The present study develops a simulation-based framework for examining emotional contagion across text-based workplace communication. Because no original organizational dataset was supplied, 540 synthetic communication episodes were modeled across positive, neutral, and negative text conditions. Emotional contagion was operationalized through recipient affect change, perceived emotional intensity, reply-valence matching, tone recognition, and perceived team-climate shift. The simulation indicates substantially greater affective transfer under emotionally valenced messages than neutral communication. Positive-text exposure was associated with a modeled affect-transfer index of 67, while negative-text exposure produced an index of 72 and neutral communication produced an index of 18. These values are illustrative rather than empirical estimates. The paper argues that text-based emotional contagion should be distinguished from emotional miscommunication. A message can successfully transmit affect, but a recipient can also infer greater negativity, irritation, urgency, or emotional distance than the sender intended. Byron's work on workplace email and Kruger and colleagues' experimental research demonstrate that the loss of paralinguistic cues can make tone interpretation vulnerable to sender–receiver asymmetry. The study therefore proposes a dual-path model in which workplace text can produce genuine emotional convergence while simultaneously creating opportunities for inaccurate emotional attribution. The findings have implications for digital leadership, virtual teamwork, employee well-being, and organizational communication policy. Leaders and team members should recognize that apparently minor textual choices can contribute cumulatively to the emotional tone of distributed work groups. At the same time, organizations should avoid excessive emotional surveillance or automated interpretation of employee messages because emotion inference from text is context-sensitive and potentially fallible. The paper concludes that emotionally sustainable digital workplaces require clarity, contextualization, appropriate response norms, and awareness of how repeated textual cues influence collective affect
Keywords	emotional contagion; workplace communication; text-based communication; virtual teams; computer-mediated communication; workplace emotion; digital collaboration; group affective tone
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 2, March-April 2023
Published On	2023-04-25

View / Download PDF File

About AJAMIR Fees & Payment Current Issue Publication Archive	Submit Research Paper Track Submission Status Publication Guidelines Publication Ethics Peer Review & Plagiarism	Join as a Reviewer Editors & Reviewers Reviewer Referral Program Get Reviewer Membership Certi.	Website/Journal Policies Usage Policy Content Policies Privacy Policy

Contact Us		+1-872-302-3851	editor@ajamir.com

American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Emotional Contagion Across Text-Based Workplace Communication

Share this