A smiley face can hurt your credibility at work, study finds

A cheerful emoji can brighten a group chat. In a workplace message, it may do something else entirely.

That is the basic takeaway from a study led by University of Ottawa researchers, who examined how emojis shape impressions of competence and appropriateness in professional instant messages. Their results suggest that the safest option in workplace messaging is often the plainest one: no emoji at all.

Across the study, messages without emojis were judged as the most professional and the most appropriate. Negative emojis did the most damage, especially when they appeared beside neutral or positive messages. Positive emojis fared better, but only in certain contexts, and they did not consistently improve how senders were viewed.

The study was led by Erin L. Courtice of the School of Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at uOttawa, working with Megan Lawrence, Charles A. Collin, and Isabelle Boutet.

“This study highlights the importance of being mindful about the potential impact of emojis on professional interactions,” Courtice wrote. “Emojis are not simply neutral add-ons to text messages; they can influence how others perceive us, particularly in terms of competence and appropriateness. By understanding the nuances of emoji use, professionals can leverage these digital tools to enhance their communication and build stronger workplace relationships.”

The question behind the work is simple enough. In face-to-face conversation, people rely on tone of voice, facial expressions and body language to read intent. Text-based workplace communication strips most of that away. Emojis seem like an easy substitute.

The researchers argued that this does not mean emojis operate without social rules. Professional settings still come with expectations about emotional expression, and those expectations may affect how a message is received.

To test that idea, the team asked participants to read short workplace-style messages from a co-worker in a professional setting. Some messages were positive, some neutral and some negative. They were paired with either a positive emoji, a negative emoji or no emoji at all. Participants then rated the sender’s emotional tone, competence and appropriateness.

The final analysis included 243 participants. All were undergraduate students at the time of data collection. Of that group, 134 were men and 109 were women. Their average age was 21.63.

The broad pattern was clear. Messages with no emoji came out looking best.

For appropriateness, sentences without emojis ranked highest overall. Messages with positive emojis came next. Messages with negative emojis landed at the bottom.

Competence ratings followed a similar pattern, though with a few wrinkles. Positive or upbeat messages tended to earn stronger competence ratings than negative ones. But the presence of a negative emoji pulled those ratings down sharply, especially when the written message itself was neutral or positive.

That mattered because a negative emoji could change the feel of the whole message. The researchers found that it pushed people toward a more negative reading of the sender’s emotional tone, regardless of the sentence it accompanied.

Positive emojis were more limited. When paired with neutral or positive messages, they could improve impressions compared with negative emojis. Still, they often did not beat the no-emoji version. In one key result, adding a positive emoji to a positive sentence did not raise perceptions of appropriateness compared with leaving the emoji out.

So while cheerful symbols did not always hurt, they also did not reliably help.

The worst combinations were often the mismatched ones.

A positive emoji attached to a negative message did not soften the blow. Instead, the researchers said, it could create a sense of dissonance or insincerity. In that situation, the sender could come across as less competent than if they had simply delivered the message without the extra symbol.

Negative emojis created problems even when they fit the message. A negative sentence paired with a negative emoji was seen as more coherent than a negative emoji attached to a positive or neutral sentence. Yet that did not fully rescue the sender’s image. Negative emojis still produced low competence ratings overall.

In other words, emoji use was not a magic fix for difficult communication. It could just as easily add ambiguity, or make the sender seem less professional.

The team linked this to the broader idea of workplace “display rules,” the social expectations that shape how emotions should be expressed on the job. Even in digital communication, people appear to judge whether emotional cues fit the setting.

The researchers also looked at whether participant gender and sender gender changed those judgments.

Most of the big effects came from message tone and emoji choice, not gender. Still, one pattern stood out. Women participants judged some negatively toned messages from women senders more harshly on appropriateness than men participants did.

That effect appeared when a woman sender used a negative emoji, and also in some cases when the message itself was negative and contained no emoji. The effect sizes were small, but the pattern pointed to the possibility that gender expectations still shape digital workplace communication.

The study did not find large gender effects on competence. The authors suggested a few possible reasons for that. One is that text-based communication may reduce the salience of gender compared with face-to-face interactions. Another is that the study used explicit male or female labels for senders rather than more detailed identity cues such as names or photos.

The study has limits. The sample was made up of undergraduate students, not a broad cross-section of workers. The messages were hypothetical, brief and tightly controlled. Only two facial emojis were tested, a grinning face and an angry face, both from iOS. The researchers also excluded participants based on several data-quality and design criteria, reducing the original pool from 404 to 243.

Even so, the study offers a practical look at a very common workplace habit. Instant messaging now plays a major role in professional life, and these small choices can shape how a co-worker is read.

Courtice and Boutet said future research should move beyond first impressions and examine what emoji use does to conversation flow, rapport building, conflict resolution and team cohesion in digital work settings.

For anyone sending workplace messages, the lesson is not that emojis are forbidden. It is that they are risky in ways people may underestimate.

If your message is already clear and professional, leaving the emoji out may protect your credibility. Positive emojis may work in neutral or upbeat exchanges, but they do not automatically make you seem more appropriate. Negative emojis appear to carry the biggest downside and are generally best avoided.

The larger point is that people do not read emojis as harmless decoration. In workplace settings, they can shape judgments about competence, professionalism and trust.

Research findings are available online in the journal Collabra.

The original story "A smiley face can hurt your credibility at work, study finds" is published in The Brighter Side of News.

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