Grief and Work

Abstract

A seemingly rational workplace, in fact, is full of intertwined emotional events, and grief is one of them. However, the significance of underlying emotions that employees carry with them to the workplace and the impact of employees’ perceived notions toward the organization about the way management handles employee problems are not recognized and properly understood. I learned about my own emotional struggles and those of my coworkers while experiencing the loss of a close colleague, Jay, with cancer. This autoethnographical study is my attempt to formulate a narrative of the whole experience to elicit subjective meanings and learning from it.

“Aliens” in the United States: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Foreign-Born Faculty

“…Autoethnography is a nontraditional but now well-explored methodology in organization studies (e.g., Boyle & Parry, 2007; Cruz, 2016; Daskalaki, 2012; Doloriert & Sambrook, 2012; Empson, 2013; Han, 2012; Learmonth & Humphreys, 2011; McDonald, 2013; Rowe, O’Brien, Rouse, & Nixon, 2012; Tomkins & Nicholds, 2017). Autoethnographers generate insights about social phenomena by drawing from their situated experiences (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2014; Ellis, 2004).…”

Monday Mourning: A Call for the Study of Bereavement in the Workplace

“…Work within the organizational sciences consists of five conceptual papers and eight qualitative empirical papers (including five autoethnographies; Han, 2012;Hazen, 2003Hazen, , 2006Peticca-Harris, 2019;Porschitz & Siler, 2017). Using role theory, Bento (1994) conceptualized bereaved employees as holding two roles simultaneously-their employee role (focused on performance and productivity) and their griever role (focused on grieving and adjusting to loss).…”

“…The first theme is the differing types of bereavement. For instance, half of the qualitative papers focused on collective bereavement (e.g., a shared group loss, such as that of a coworker; Han, 2012;Hyde & Thomas, 2003;Kessler et al, 2012;Peticca-Harris, 2019) while the remainder focused on individual bereavement (i.e., a personal loss occurring outside of work; Gilbert et al, 2021;Hazen, 2003Hazen, , 2006Porschitz & Siler, 2017). This distinction is important as it highlights the isolation of individual bereavement.…”

“…The second theme is about how employees experience bereavement. Past work highlights the challenging nature of workplace bereavement (e.g., Han, 2012; Peticca-Harris, 2019), which includes difficulties in emotional regulation (Kessler et al, 2012; Porschitz & Siler, 2017), feeling socially and emotionally isolated, concerns about maintaining “professionalism” (Gilbert et al, 2021), managing others’ needs at work (e.g., particularly in terms of emotional labor for customers or clients; Peticca-Harris, 2019) and, longer term, realizing coworkers have forgotten about the loss (Gilbert et al, 2021). However, we know little about how bereaved employees manage their dual employee and griever roles (Bento, 1994), the role overload they may experience (Stroebe & Schut, 2016), and the specific challenges and demands they face upon returning to work.…”