反之亦然。卡岑巴赫说，公司里有些人让其他人对工作感觉良好，从中获得满足，就算管理层从来没有肯定过他们的作用。

    公司经理可以通过引导工作氛围做出改变。大多数员工既非头号推动者，也不是极端拖后腿的人；他们介于两者之间，但他们受这两者的影响很大。要让每个人都信心满满，最好的方式是让他们进一步接近活跃的积极推动者——创造机会让员工从最好的人那里进行学习。卡岑巴赫说，积极向上“是可以传染的”。

    克罗斯称，积极的人采取某些特定的方式行事：“他们总是看到现实中的机会，而不是限制。他们寻找途径确保其他人也成为解决方案中的一部分。”卡岑巴赫说，他们也可以将这些特质传递给那些乐于接受的人，而且他们往往也知道哪些人最容易受到感染。

    当然，在大公司，这需要真正了解情况的经理聘请专家从非正式网络中进行筛选，发掘最好的部分。克罗斯说，他通常与大公司的最高层一起工作。对于我们这些处在企业链底端的人们，或许得自己想办法了。

    但这些经验仍然适用。简而言之，如果员工们的周围是那些让他们对工作和自己感觉良好的人，任何地方的办公室都可以变成令人更愉快的场所。

    But the opposite is also true. There are people at companies, Katzenbach says, who gain satisfaction from making others feel good about their work, even though management may never recognize their role.

    Managers can make a difference by guiding the workplace environment. Most employees are neither top motivators nor powerful downers; they are somewhere between the two extremes yet highly influenced by both. The best way to get everyone's spirits up is to position them closer to your active energizers -- create opportunities for employees to learn from your best people. Positivity, Katzenbach says, "is a catching disease."

    These positive players behave in certain ways, according to Cross: "They tend to see possibilities in situations rather than constraints. They find ways to make sure that others feel part of a solution." They can also teach these traits to people who would be willing to embrace them and generally tend to know the people they could most easily influence, Katzenbach says.

    Of course, it takes a pretty in-tune manager to hire experts to pick through the informal network at a big company and then feed the best parts of it. Usually, Cross says, he works with the top layers of management at big companies. For those of us at the bottom of the corporate chain, we may be left to fend for ourselves.

    But the lessons still apply. Simply put, offices everywhere might become much happier places if workers try to surround themselves with those who make them feel good about their jobs and themselves.