Curing the Negative Social Contagion of Low Morale
LINK: https://qz.com/1117485/unhappy-people-spread-their-emotions-to-their-coworkers-according-to-research/
This article deals mostly with negative social contagions within the context of the work environment and how to “cure” them, or at least mitigate them. The articles outlines several situations in which negative emotions can act as a social contagion and spread out amongst the entire workforce, “Employees cry in bathroom stalls, brood through meetings, and complain about their bosses in whispers by the coffee machine. The more frustrated people feel, the less inspired they are to do good work, and productivity and creativity plummet accordingly.” When coworkers see others slacking or feeling stressed, those feelings cascade around the office. To combat this, the article suggests implementing various morale-boosting techniques such as removing the negative source or spreading compassionate love, or rather, kindness.
We can relate this article to a topic in class that we’ve been recently covering: cascade model and social contagion diffusion. The article uses direct terminology that we have been covering in class and offers us real-world examples of how social contagions can spread and diffuse throughout a population. Additionally, the cascade model is exemplified through the spread of low-morale, where one coworker being negative can effectively cause the whole office to start feeling negative as well. Perhaps we could model the flip of the diffusion of the negative social contagion by reversing the calculations with kindness and positive morale and seeing how the negativity is replaced by positivity.