Grieving Through the Day: A Daily Investigation of Employees’ Episodic Grief and Coworkers’ Compassionate Response

Abstract

The central aim of this dissertation was to examine how grief emanating from a loss in employees’ personal lives spills into professional domains to influence their work and well-being outcomes. Drawing from Conservation of Resources theory, I adopted an episodic approach to understand the momentary experience of grief as it is elicited and managed in organizational contexts. I conceptualize episodic grief as a relatively discrete emotional experience of predominantly negative loss-related cognitions and emotions following an internal or external reminder of a personal loss. I further considered the role that others within the workplace social context play in further eroding resources following a loss via grief stigma and in facilitating rebuilding of resources via coworker compassion when episodic grief spills into organizational contexts. I adopted a multilevel approach to investigate the hypothesized model in a 10-day field study using experience sampling methods (ESM) to measure participants’ (N = 119) grief and work experiences at three points throughout their workday. Results indicated that episodic grief experiences in the morning related to increased work disruption in the afternoon, and indirectly related to higher levels of emotional exhaustion in the evenings through work disruption. Grief stigma (but not coworker compassion) moderated these relationships such that the indirect effect of grief on burnout through work disruption was significantly stronger when grief stigma was higher compared to when it was lower. Results did not support a link between episodic grief and work engagement, or the expected indirect relationships to psychological detachment. In the final chapter, I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this work, as well as its limitations and fruitful directions for future work.