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Tweet you right back: Follower anxiety predicts leader anxiety in social media interactions during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

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posted on 2023-09-14, 14:59 authored by Alexandros PsychogiosAlexandros Psychogios, Dritjon Gruda, Adegboyega Ojo
Recent research has shown that organizational leaders’ tweets can influence employee anxiety. In this study, we turn the table and examine whether the same can be said about followers’ tweets. Based on emotional contagion and a dataset of 108 leaders and 178 followers across 50 organizations, we infer and track state- and trait-anxiety scores of participants over 316 days, including pre- and post the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and crisis. We show that although leaders traditionally possess greater authority and power than their followers, followers have the power to influence their leaders’ state anxiety. In addition, this influence is particularly strong in the case of less trait anxious leaders.

Funding

Seed funding for the presented algorithm was provided by the School of Business, Maynooth University, Ireland.

History

School

  • Loughborough Business School

Published in

PLoS ONE

Volume

18

Issue

2

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© Psychogios et al.

Publisher statement

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Acceptance date

2022-12-01

Publication date

2023-02-09

Copyright date

2023

eISSN

1932-6203

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Alexandros Psychogios. Deposit date: 8 September 2023

Article number

e0279164

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