Positive emotions are important for that.”Įxactly what people are doing that sets others at ease or puts them off hasn’t yet been studied. “People are not necessarily open to novel ideas, so in order to speak your ideas, you need to feel safe. “When you propose novel ideas, that is in some way dangerous, because you are challenging the status quo,” Madrid says. Subordinates are more likely to voice their ideas, too, to a leader with positive affective presence. He and his collaborators have found that leaders who make other people feel good by their very presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to more innovation. Hector Madrid, an organizational-behavior professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, has taken a particular interest in how the affective presence of leaders in the workplace can influence their teams’ performance. They also got more romantic interest from others in a separate speed-dating study. Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are more central to their social networks-in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmates considered them to be friends. Read: Mixed signals: Why people misunderstand each other Some people bring out great things in others while they’re themselves quite depressed.” “They may be content because they’re always getting their way. It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed all the time,” Elfenbein says. “To use common, everyday words, some people are just annoying. But affective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings-those with positive affective presence make other people feel good, even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative affective presence. It’s been known for some time that emotions are contagious: If one person feels angry, she may well infect her neighbor with that anger. It seems that “our own way of being has an emotional signature,” says Elfenbein, a business professor at Washington University in St. The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers. Then the members of each group rated how much every other member made them feel eight different emotions: stressed, bored, angry, sad, calm, relaxed, happy, and enthusiastic. They put business-school students into groups, had them enroll in all the same classes for a semester, and do every group project together. This concept was first described nearly 10 years ago in a study by Noah Eisenkraft and Hillary Anger Elfenbein. Researchers call it “affective presence.” A small body of psychology research supports the idea that the way a person tends to make others feel is a consistent and measurable part of his personality. Others seem to make teeth clench and eyes roll no matter what they do. Some people can walk into a room and instantly put everyone at ease.
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