Is It Really Contagious? A Quasi-Replication of "The Epidemic of Mental Disorders in Business"

This paper presents two quasi-replication studies aimed at reexamining the work of Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg (KAL) (2022) on the social contagion of mental disorders within organizations. The KAL study showed that newcomers (i) with mental disorders and (ii) coming from “unhealthy” firms spread these disorders on the work floor, with the effects being stronger when hiring for managerial positions. However, the study has been criticized for using a poor measure of mental disorder diagnoses, identifying only about 10% of treated individuals. We address this limitation by replicating their work using psychotropic medication prescriptions as a more accurate and well-established proxy for mental disorder diagnoses in a multi-study quasi-replication design conducted in Denmark and the Netherlands. Contrary to the original findings, we do not observe a social contagion effect across any of the studies or hypotheses. Instead, our results reveal several alternative mechanisms that challenge the generalizability of KAL’s findings, thereby highlighting the complexities of mental disorder dynamics in organizational contexts.