Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Contagious performance
The data came from 58,000 working hours across 11 companies in different industries. Performance appears to be contagious: highly effective, charismatic people lift the people around them.
Confident posture spreads the same way. Seeing someone sit in high-confident body language makes people more likely to sit that way themselves, so a person can both absorb that lift and hand it out.
It runs both ways
The effect runs in both directions, which is why a day that starts with getting your own energy and self-talk right matters. A person who skips that step becomes more negatively contagious.
How do researchers measure peer effects at work?
In a 2009 paper in the American Economic Review, Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti studied supermarket cashiers whose scanning speed was recorded on every item. Because shift schedules varied, they could compare the same cashier working alongside faster and slower colleagues. A cashier's productivity rose when a faster cashier joined the shift, especially for cashiers who were within sight of the faster worker.
Why do people copy others without noticing?
In a 1999 study, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh had participants work on a task with a partner who was actually a confederate. The confederate either rubbed their face or shook their foot. Participants tended to mirror whichever behavior their partner showed, without reporting that they had noticed. The authors named this the chameleon effect.
More from The Mel Robbins Podcast
