Gruda, Dritjon and Ojo, Adegboyega and Psychogios, Alexandros (2022) Don’t you tweet me badly: Anxiety contagion between leaders and followers in computer-mediated communication during COVID-19. PLOS ONE, 17 (3). e0264444. ISSN 1932-6203

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Don’t you tweet me badly; Anxiety contagion; leaders; followers; computer-mediated communication; COVID-19;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Innovation Value Institute, IVI Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Business
Item ID:	15777
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264444
Depositing User:	Adegboyega Ojo
Date Deposited:	05 Apr 2022 14:03
Journal or Publication Title:	PLOS ONE
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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