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Observational Study
. 2022 Mar 4;17(3):e0264444.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264444. eCollection 2022.

Don't you tweet me badly: Anxiety contagion between leaders and followers in computer-mediated communication during COVID-19

Dritjon Gruda  1 , Adegboyega Ojo  1 , Alexandros Psychogios  2   3
Affiliations
Free PMC article
Observational Study

Don't you tweet me badly: Anxiety contagion between leaders and followers in computer-mediated communication during COVID-19

Dritjon Gruda et al. PLoS One. .
Free PMC article

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Regression interaction between leader state- and leader trait anxiety on follower state anxiety.
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The authors received no specific funding for this work.