Your short fuse is probably anxiety in disguise | V3 Ep.4

One stressed person can infect an entire team. One genuinely anxious or hot tempered person can drag down an entire team and the science behind it is unsettling. Emotion is contagious. Negative emotion spreads faster than positive. When one person's stress or irritability is in the room, it doesn't stay with them.

It seeps through the whole group, the climate tightens, and even the steady people start scanning for threats that aren't there. My own doctoral research found that as a team's average neuroticism arises, performance falls away sharply through exactly that contagion. If you lead people, this isn't a soft issue you can ignore.

Managing the emotional climate is part of a leader's job, and here's the upside. A calm, steady presence spreads just as easily. More on the channel.