The Dark Side of EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
Emotional contagion is a three-step process through which an individual’s emotions transfer to another individual within a group.
Investment banks – and the financial services industry at large – continue to bear the reputational scares of some high-profile ethical scandals. In spite of numerous efforts for avoiding ethical risk, emotional contagion, a key factor of ethical risk remains largely overlooked. Hence, it is critical to address the question of how emotional contagion arises and how it can be detected.
Following a number of high-profile ethical scandals in investment banks, the call for changing corporate culture is increasingly gaining traction. However, beyond the fact that cultural change programmes often fail to deliver upon their expected outcomes, such programmes may not be required – or should, at least, be revisited – in order to tackle emotional contagion – the often-overlooked key factor of ethical risk. This should hardly come as a surprise considering that at the end of the day, “you bring your emotions to
