When a Leader’s Stress Becomes the Team’s Stress: Understanding Emotional Contagion at Work

Did you know that stress at work may not remain with the person who first experiences it?

Within teams, emotions and patterns of behaviour can spread. A manager dealing with constant pressure may unintentionally create a sense of urgency, uncertainty or tension among employees. Over time, the manager’s experience of stress can begin to influence how the entire team feels and works.

This does not mean that leaders must always appear calm or conceal difficult emotions. It does, however, show that supporting the well-being of managers is not only important for managers themselves. It can also be an important part of protecting the wider team.

When Stress Becomes a Shared Experience

Workplace stress is often discussed as an individual experience. One employee may have an excessive workload, another may struggle with unclear responsibilities, and someone else may find it difficult to disconnect from work.However, people do not experience work in isolation. They continuously observe the emotions, reactions and working habits of those around them.

This is particularly relevant in relationships between managers and employees. Managers communicate priorities, allocate work, respond to problems and set expectations about how quickly tasks should be completed. Their behaviour therefore provides information about whether a situation is manageable, urgent or potentially threatening.

European data illustrates the wider scale of the issue. EU-OSHA reports that almost 45% of workers are exposed to factors that may negatively affect their mental health. Its 2022 OSH Pulse survey also found that 27% of workers experienced stress, anxiety or depression caused or made worse by work.

Against this background, it becomes important to understand not only what causes stress, but also how stress may move through a workplace.

What Are Emotional Contagion and Stress Crossover?

Emotional contagion describes the process through which one person’s emotional state influences the emotions of others.

This may happen consciously, but it is often subtle. People notice facial expressions, tone of voice, pace of communication and changes in behaviour. They may then begin to mirror the emotions they observe or use those emotions to interpret what is happening around them.

For example, when a manager appears consistently anxious, team members may conclude that something is wrong, even when little has been communicated directly. They may become more cautious, work faster than necessary or avoid raising questions because the manager already appears overwhelmed.

A related concept is known as stress crossover. While emotional contagion focuses on the transmission of emotions, stress crossover refers more broadly to one person’s strain affecting the well-being or working experience of another.

This crossover can occur through emotional signals, but also through practical changes in behaviour. A stressed manager may provide less guidance, postpone decisions, communicate less clearly or pass additional pressure downwards. Stress therefore travels not only through mood, but also through the way work is organised.

What Does the Research Tell Us?

A longitudinal study involving 5,653 employees and 452 immediate managers in a large Danish municipality found evidence that occupational stress could transfer from managers to employees.

The relationship was still detectable one year after managers had initially reported symptoms of stress. The researchers did not find the same significant relationship after three years, suggesting that the effect weakens over time. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that leadership stress may have consequences that continue well beyond a single difficult week or demanding project.

Other studies show how particular leadership behaviours can create additional strain for employees.

Research on supervisors’ workaholism found that it was associated with employees experiencing greater workloads and more interpersonal conflict. These increased demands were then connected to emotional exhaustion and intentions to leave the organisation. The issue was therefore not simply that employees observed their supervisor working excessively. The supervisor’s behaviour also changed the conditions under which employees worked.

A 2024 study conducted during organisational change provides another example. Researchers collected information from 372 employees and 62 managers across 74 teams. Managers’ emotional exhaustion was associated with more passive, or laissez-faire, leadership. This was in turn connected to lower psychological safety and reduced team readiness for change.

The researchers suggested that exhausted managers may withdraw some of the time and energy they normally invest in supporting their teams as a way of protecting their remaining resources. This is understandable from the manager’s perspective, but it may leave employees with less guidance and less confidence to speak up during uncertain periods.

Together, these studies point to an important conclusion: a leader’s stress does not need to be expressed through anger or obvious conflict to influence a team. It may also appear through reduced communication, indecision, withdrawal or the unintentional creation of additional demands.

How Leadership Stress Appears in Everyday Work

Stress transmission is not always dramatic. It can emerge through ordinary workplace interactions.

A manager under pressure may send messages late at night without explicitly expecting an immediate response. Employees may still interpret the timing as a signal that they should remain available.

A manager may repeatedly describe every new request as urgent. Over time, employees can lose the ability to distinguish between genuine priorities and routine demands.

In other situations, a stressed manager may become less accessible. Meetings are cancelled, questions remain unanswered and employees are left to make decisions without sufficient information. The result may be uncertainty rather than direct pressure, but uncertainty itself can become a source of stress.

Leaders also influence how teams interpret mistakes. When a manager reacts to problems with visible frustration, employees may become more reluctant to report concerns or test new ideas. When the same manager responds with curiosity and focuses on solutions, the situation may feel more manageable.

Small leadership behaviours therefore help shape the emotional climate of the team.

This Is Not About Hiding Emotions

Recognising emotional contagion does not mean that managers should pretend everything is fine.

An expectation that leaders must always remain positive can create a different problem. It may encourage emotional suppression, make honest communication more difficult and reinforce the idea that stress is a personal weakness.

Teams can usually recognise when a manager is under pressure. Silence or forced positivity may create more uncertainty than a calm and appropriate acknowledgement of the situation.

A manager might explain that the team is entering a demanding period, clarify which priorities matter most and acknowledge where information is still missing. This is different from transferring uncontrolled anxiety to employees.

Healthy leadership is therefore not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to recognise emotions, communicate them responsibly and avoid turning personal strain into a permanent condition for the team.

Supporting the People Who Support the Team

Managers are frequently expected to identify employee stress, hold supportive conversations and maintain team morale. At the same time, their own well-being may receive considerably less attention.

They may be positioned between organisational decisions and employee concerns, with responsibility for implementing changes they did not design. They may also face pressure to deliver results while providing reassurance, answering questions and managing conflict.

This makes it important to avoid presenting stress contagion as an individual leadership failure.

The World Health Organization identifies excessive workloads, low job control, limited support and authoritarian supervision among the workplace conditions that can create risks to mental health. WHO recommends organisational interventions that address working conditions directly, alongside training that helps managers recognise emotional distress, communicate openly and understand how workplace stressors can be managed.

Manager training can be valuable, but it cannot compensate for structural problems such as persistent understaffing, unrealistic workloads or unclear responsibilities.

Organisations should therefore examine whether managers have the time, authority, information and support required to lead effectively. They should also consider whether managers have somewhere to discuss difficult situations without feeling that admitting pressure will damage their credibility.

Supporting managers protects more than one person. Because managers influence work allocation, communication and the emotional tone of teams, strengthening their resources can have wider preventive value.

Creating a Healthier Team Climate

Preventing stress crossover does not require leaders to monitor every facial expression or eliminate every sign of pressure.

It begins with awareness of the signals being sent.

Managers can pause before communicating urgency and ask whether a request is genuinely time-sensitive. They can clarify priorities instead of allowing every task to appear equally important. When they are unavailable, they can explain how decisions should be handled rather than leaving employees in uncertainty.

Regular check-ins can also help managers notice whether their own stress is changing the way they communicate. Asking employees what is creating unnecessary pressure may reveal patterns that are difficult to see from a leadership position.

Organisations can support this by treating psychosocial risks in the same structured way as other occupational health and safety risks. EU-OSHA emphasises that these risks should be viewed as organisational issues rather than individual faults and addressed through preventive, systematic action.

This means looking beyond individual resilience and asking how workload, communication, decision-making and management support affect the whole team.

From Individual Stress to Organisational Responsibility

Stress may start with one person, but it is shaped by relationships and working conditions.

Leaders have a particular influence because their behaviour affects both how employees feel and how work is organised. When leaders are exhausted, anxious or continuously overloaded, the effects may reach further than organisations realise.

The answer is not to blame managers or expect them to become emotionally neutral. It is to recognise leadership well-being as part of the organisation’s broader psychosocial environment.

The StressOut project supports this approach by combining individual stress-management resources with tools and guidance for employers. Its resources encourage organisations to consider not only how employees respond to stress, but also how workplace practices can prevent stress from accumulating and spreading.

What’s Next?

A healthy team is not created by a leader who never experiences stress. It is created when difficult periods can be acknowledged, managed and discussed without pressure silently passing from one person to the next.

Organisations can begin by asking a simple question:

Are we only teaching managers how to support stressed employees, or are we also creating conditions that support the managers themselves?

Recognising the contagious nature of workplace stress changes the focus. Manager well-being is no longer only a personal concern. It becomes an important part of building healthier teams, safer working environments and more sustainable organisations.

👉 Explore the StressOut App, tools, and resources in the Resource Centre:
https://stressout-project.eu/resource-centre/

References

1. Bonnesen, L., Pihl-Thingvad, S., & Winter, V. (2022). The contagious leader: A panel study on occupational stress transfer in a large Danish municipality. BMC Public Health, 22, 1874.
2. European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Psychosocial risks and mental health at work. EU-OSHA.
3. Groulx, P., Maisonneuve, F., Harvey, J.-F., & Johnson, K. J. (2024). The ripple effect of strain in times of change: How manager emotional exhaustion affects team psychological safety and readiness to change. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1298104.
4. Kim, N., Kang, Y. J., Choi, J., & Sohn, Y. W. (2020). The crossover effects of supervisors’ workaholism on subordinates’ turnover intention: The mediating role of two types of job demands and emotional exhaustion. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(21), 7742.
5. World Health Organization. (2022). WHO guidelines on mental health at work. Geneva: World Health Organization.
6. World Health Organization. (2024). Mental health at work.