Your Work Emojis Are Sending a Message, It Just Might Not Be The One You Think

Every day, billions of instant messages fly between coworkers on platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Tucked into many of those messages are emojis, tiny digital faces meant to soften a request, celebrate a win, or vent frustration. New research from the University of Ottawa suggests that one wrong emoji choice in a professional message can shift how competent and professional colleagues perceive a sender. An angry face emoji, in particular, can hurt that impression, even when the words themselves are perfectly reasonable.

Workplace digital communication has never been more dominant. According to statistics cited in the paper, 91% of businesses now use two or more chat platforms, and Slack alone reports more than 42 million daily active users spending an average of 90 minutes on the platform each day. Post-pandemic, workplace instant messaging has only grown. Yet for all those hours spent typing to colleagues, surprisingly little research had explored how tiny cartoon faces at the end of a message shape professional reputations.

“Therefore, emojis have the potential to enhance text-based interactions, where nonverbal expressions of emotions are not readily available,” the researchers write. As their experiment shows, that potential cuts both ways, and the stakes are higher than most people probably realize.

Inside the Emoji Experiment

Researchers Erin L. Courtice, Megan Lawrence, Charles A. Collin, and Isabelle Boutet designed a study to test how emojis paired with workplace messages affected judgments about the sender. Published in the journal Collabra: Psychology, the study recruited 243 participants (134 men and 109 women), all undergraduate students with an average age of about 21.

Each participant read short instant messages in a hypothetical professional scenario, supposedly sent by a coworker of either the same or opposite gender. Messages were pre-tested to confirm they read as genuinely positive (“Just attended another super effective presentation”), negative (“This is going to ruin my project”), or neutral (“Is there a meeting today”). Each sentence appeared with a grinning face emoji, an angry face emoji, or no emoji. Participants then rated the sender’s emotional tone, perceived competence, and how appropriate the message felt professionally. Participants who failed attention checks or couldn’t recall the sender’s gender were screened out.

What Workplace Emojis Actually Do to Professional Reputations

Emojis, it turns out, are not neutral decoration. Both emoji type and message content shaped how senders were perceived.

Negative emojis consistently lowered competence ratings. Pairing an angry face with a positive or neutral sentence dragged down perceptions of the sender’s competence significantly. Typing “We have great new office chairs” followed by an angry emoji was the kind of mismatch participants found particularly off-putting. Even when the angry emoji matched a negative sentence, competence ratings stayed low. Regardless of what the words said, the angry emoji made senders look less capable.

A grinning face improved competence perceptions compared to an angry face when the message was positive or neutral, though it offered no advantage over sending plain text. When paired with a negative message, the grinning face came across as mismatched and did not improve competence ratings. Paired correctly, a positive emoji does no harm; paired incorrectly, it signals a disconnect that undercuts the sender.

On appropriateness, messages without any emoji ranked highest, followed closely by those with a grinning face. Messages with an angry face ranked last, regardless of sentence content. Slapping an angry emoji on a workplace message is one of the fastest signals that a sender doesn’t understand professional norms.

Workplace Emojis and a Gender Double Standard

Perhaps the most telling finding involved gender. Men and women participants responded to emoji-message combinations in similar ways overall. One result stood out.

When women participants evaluated messages supposedly sent by women coworkers, they judged negative messages, particularly those with angry emojis or negative sentences without any emoji, as less appropriate than men participants did when evaluating the same messages. This effect didn’t appear for messages attributed to men. Women, in other words, held other women to a stricter standard on negativity in professional messages.

Researchers connect this to broader scholarship on workplace gender dynamics. Women often face what scholars call a “double bind,” where assertiveness can undermine likability and warmth can invite competence penalties. Here, the gender effect appeared only in appropriateness judgments, not in competence ratings, and the effect sizes were small. Still, the pattern was consistent with prior research suggesting women may face sharper scrutiny from other women when expressing negative emotions on the job.

What the Research Means for Messaging at Work

In this study, the angry emoji consistently lowered competence and appropriateness ratings, regardless of what the accompanying words said. While the setting was controlled, the underlying dynamic is worth taking seriously: small choices in digital communication, like a poorly matched emoji, can shape the impressions a sender makes.

A grinning face, used alongside positive or neutral content, holds its own without causing reputational harm. But it isn’t the reputation booster some casual senders might assume. In workplace messaging, the real risk isn’t going emoji-free. It’s reaching for the wrong one.

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