Chapter 4: Mortality Salience in the Workplace: An Integrative Review and Implications for Supervising Jobs With High Exposure to Death

Deaths in the workplace are stressful occurrences that can negatively impact the organization and its members. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to explain how employees’ encounters with death can influence their attitude, thoughts, and behavior through mortality salience. By reviewing the extant literature on mortality salience, we identify two components of mortality salience that can greatly influence whether employees negatively or positively cope with and react to death on the job (i.e., death anxiety and death reflection). For each component, we discuss in detail how employees psychologically process death and then outline behaviors that these employees engage in to help supervisors identify how an employee is coping with death on the job. We then conclude this chapter by providing some practical recommendations organizations can implement to mitigate the negative consequences associated with employees who are emotionally impacted by a death on the job and exacerbate the positive consequences that can follow when employees consciously reflect on the death that occurred.