Primitive emotional mimicry
With primitive emotional mimicry (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson,1994), people mimic the facial expression of others, as well as their body language and movements, automatically and subconsciously. This is the idea of “monkey-see, monkey-do” where employees may become emotionally positive about the business simply by mimicking emotionally positive language, expression, and behavior of entrepreneurs. Emotional display on the part of entrepreneurs should evoke emotions in employees, or at least mimicry of the display (Neumann & Strack, 2000), based on primitive emotional mimicry research. Over time when employees display a certain emotion, they begin to internalize it, and the actual emotional may develop (Lazarus, 1991). While primitive emotional mimicry is enough for emotional contagion to occur, we argue that it is not enough to create employee passion for the venture, for three primary reasons. First, entrepreneurial passion involves more than just momentary emotions; it involves long-term enduring feelings. Emotional mimicry may lead employees to act happy or excited about the venture, but such emotions will likely not last once the trigger that produced the emotion is removed. Psychological research supports this claim, in that when stimuli used to induce positive emotions are removed, such as giving people a small prize, the associated positive emotions also typically diminish quickly (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2003; Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1999).
