Emodetionnal diffusion. Non-routine emo-decisional diffusion: The role of emotion leaders’ impact and followers’ emotional resistance

Abstract

Research has shown that a decision cannot be made by excluding emotions from the equation, while others have argued that emotions are contagious. We argue that emotions can be a vehicle for decisions within a working group and that, in this case, decisions spread more quickly than under cognitive diffusion of information. To expand upon our thinking here, we believe that the presence of individuals that term as “emotion leaders” (contaminating agents) as well as “emotion receivers” (contaminated agents) increase the contagiousness of a decision, particularly in organizations. Although many studies have focused on managerial decision-making, decisions made under the influence of emotions remain little studied. Likewise, the study of non-routine decisions has often been overlooked. The present study aims to demonstrate this influence through an experiment coupled with a sociographic methodology. This experiment makes it possible (1) to isolate the adoption of a decision taken under the influence of emotions (2) to highlight the threshold of emotion resistance (the level of porosity to emotions) of individuals in a social network’and (3) to shed light on the role of emotion leaders in the acceptance of a non-routine decision in a social system. The study confirms that emotions are warning signals that accelerate the diffusion of non-routine decisions and reveals the ambivalent role of emotion leaders and the ability to “mimic” emotion resistors. The discussion of the results highlights the essential capacities and values of emotion leaders.