The hot and cool of death awareness at work: Mortality cues, aging, and self-protective and prosocial motivations

Although death awareness is pervasive in organizations and can have powerful effects on employees ’ experiences and behaviors, scholars have paid little attention to it. We develop a theoretical model of the nature, antecedents, and consequences of death awareness at work. We differentiate death anxiety and reflection as distinct states that strengthen self-protective versus prosocial motivations, examine how mortality cues and aging processes trigger these states, and explore their impact on withdrawal and generative behaviors. The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny.... Of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death (Becker, 1973: ix, 11). The tragedies of September 11 had a dramatic effect on work experiences and behaviors, both for those who were directly involved (Bacharach & Bamberger, 2007) and those who were not (Johns, 2006). For some employees the terrorist attacks resulted in crippling anxiety, leading to stress and absenteeism from work (Byron & Peterson, 2002; Salgado, 2002). For others the at-tacks inspired reflection about death and the meaning of life, motivating remarkable efforts to contribute to other people and society. Organi-zational scholars began to reflect on how they could best serve the public interest through their research and their students through their teach