The value of life - Organizational Death Awareness

The value of life - Organizational Death Awareness

Foreforeword

It's been a while. So I will make this a tradition. Once a year I will post the result of an assignment, the ultimate task at the end of each Masters course. This one takes a darkish turn on retirement and consists out of a domino chain of random thoughts (theoretic paper). 

Foreword

If one would take a darker look at retirement, it can be seen as a dubious exchange of recreational time for money, with leaving the workplace early resulting in a monetary penalty, while staying is rewarded with full financial aid and suggested safety. Since there is no certainty of how much time after the workplace will be available in good health, it may result in a struggle between the weights of financial safety and recreational fulfillment. In this case, the organization can be seen as a more powerful, permanent, and, out of an employees view, immortal being, outliving all it’s ingested entities. This shapes a heavily skewed ratio of power, in which the organization’s interest is to replace the "expired" and the employee’s interest is to ascend into the recreational afterlife. Therefore, the following paper consists out of reflections about the dynamic influence of the overarching term Death Awareness and how it might add a more fundamental perspective to the answer to the question if one should stay or leave. Furthermore, a theoretical rethinking of this term is suggested. Viewing the organizational life as a life of itself, including birth (entering), death (exiting the organization), and the afterlife (recreation),

transforms Death Awareness into Organizational Death Awareness. As an adaptation to the more fluctuation-based labour market, Organizational Death Awareness might be temporal equal to the seventh stage of Erikson’s life stage model (1998), starting with age forty and ending at age sixty-five. With this in mind, the Organizational Death Awareness Framework (ODAF), a hypothetical framework with the goal to explain individual and organizational interactions through the process of retirement, is proposed. Within this context, the paper will also connect to other subjects, such as discrimination, health, personality, life satisfaction, and leadership.

Introduction

The thought about the own mortality, either conscious or unconscious, is as inevitable as death itself. With numerous reminders in media, the newspaper’s obituary section, statistical reports on the average life expectancy of a human being (ranging from under 49.3 to 86.8, [World Health Organization, 2016]), or events occurring in our social surroundings, the mortality salience is kept undeniably high. As of now, many scholars have criticized, that death is a topic, not only avoided in conversations but also avoided in organizational research (Grant  & Wade-Benzoni, 2009; Kets de Vries, 2014). While excluding Death Awareness as an underlying motivational drive, scholars are not only lying to themselves, they are also missing possible ways to explain the behavior of senior employees in a more holistic way. In addition, this might be able to render the relationship between the organization and the employee into a more ethical and sustainable one, providing support from the organization’s position of power and thus valuing the employee’s afterlife instead of ignoring it.

Death Awareness

In contrast to personality traits, Death Awareness is seen as an externally triggered psychological state, reminding the consciousness of the host’s mortality (Grant & Wade-Benzoni, 2009). Most commonly, those mortality cues are seen as direct or indirect threats to the own life or those of others, ranging from working in a funeral home (Grant & Wade-Benzoni, 2009) to terrorist attacks such as 9/11 (Wrzesniewski, 2002). Divided into two ways of facing mortality cues, Death Awareness contains a dynamic relationship between an emotional (Death Anxiety) and a cognitive (Death Reflection) reaction. In this relationship, Death Anxiety represents a cacophony of thoughts of dread and fear which are ultimately leading to an increase of stress reactions. When thinking about the meaning of life, purpose, or which opinion others will have about me in the future, Death Reflection is the connecting term, symbolizing a more rational side while thinking about mortality (Grant & Wade-Benzoni, 2009). The literature to this topic has connected one theory to each reactional model of thought, the Terror Management Theory for Death Anxiety and the Generativity Theory for Death Reflection.

Terror Management Theory

Based on the works of Ernest Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), which again are based on several philosophical opinions about the human animal, this theory describes how people deal with the terrorful thought of being unable to change the certain outcome of their life, while simultaneously having the biological and conceptual desire to live (Greenberg, Pyszczynski,  & Solomon, 1986). While realizing the traumatic reality of this thought, people tend to in- crease self-protective measures, namely attaching themselves to literal or symbolic immortal- ity through social and religious organizations and detaching themselves from every opposing worldview challenging their attempt to outlive all. The more powerful, permanent, and collective nature of social or religious organizations, in combination with their redefinition of reality and a value-based system, assures thereby the symbolic protection of the self (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999). In this fortress of self-protection, every attempt to tear down those walls will be faced with hostility towards, and more detachment from the opposing group. Further statements on the behavioral effects found within the research of the Terror Manage- ment Theory will be given in the various sections of Death Awareness in the individual and Death Awareness in the organization.

Generativity Theory

Facing death is a part of life, or, in the view of Erikson (1993); Erikson and Erikson (1998), just a final developmental crisis. In his model of eight psychological stages, accompanying one’s life, each step to another stage contains a crisis which must be overcome. While the first six stages are mainly about learning, personal identity, and sociability, the last two stages

are dealing with the remaining life, providing motivations to create something that lives on, or finally reviewing the life lived. In a rather black and white way of thinking, both stages (from forty to sixty-five and from sixty-five to death) lead either to generativity and integrity or to stagnation and despair as a crisis outcome. The Generativity Theory builds upon the develop- mental midlife crisis when the own mortality becomes more and more salient, which results in a reflection of what was, is, and what is to come. When successfully created something out- living the self or connected to something more permanent, be it the involvement in a charity organization or the creation of a child, the next stage might be taken with more ease. Maybe it was just chance, maybe he was a visionary man, maybe authorities just liked his model, but with the last stage starting at age sixty-five, Erikson provided a good estimate of the current age of retirement in most European countries. However, when generativity, and therefore a successful reflection about life and death, is the outcome of the seventh stage, an increase in pro-social motivation is shown (Grant, 2008; Grant & Wade-Benzoni, 2009).

Retirement as a "mini-death" - Organizational Death Awareness

Although the above mentioned reactions to mortality clues can shift one’s identity and perception either towards protection of the self or finding a more meaningful purpose, the severity is often times not directly applicable to the common workplace. The thought of a link between Erikson’s seventh stage and a mortality cue as strong as the events of 9/11 might seem abstruse on first glance, but when transforming life-related terminology to Organizational Life, the conscious awareness of the own mortality is activated. Although statistically, life does not end between forty and sixty-five, the employee’s organizational life most certainly does. When considering the legal retirement age as the definitive exit, it provides the employee with the burden of knowledge about the exact time of death, which in turn changes the philosophical perspective on death itself. Whether we take Epicurus (1993), who said that death does not affect us due to the exclusivity of existence, where it can be only us or death, or Nagel (1970), who proposed that one’s fear of death is an irrational fear of missing out, the "dead" employee will be there when death is there and will also be conscious when missing out on the future of the organization. This new perspective also creates a provable afterlife, in which the employee transcends into recreation, distinguished by either heavenly or hellish characteristics. The na- ture of this experience depends on several preceding factors, such as identity, organizational mindset, social network, and future plans. Of course, this pictures only the "ideal" case, in which the employee reaches the legal retirement age and can plan ahead for this date. Under imperfect conditions, such as the bankruptcy of the organization and the resulting premature loss of the employee’s organizational life, and under the premise of a motivation to work, the employee has to either find a new job or become self-employed in order to reach recreation again. Since it is a very fluctuating labour market in which companies can grow and fall within months, the possibility of a forced early exit might lead to a perceived pressure, stress, and thus Organizational Death Anxiety in the senior employee.

In classic Death Awareness research, reflection increases with age. However, under the light of the aforementioned Damocles situation, reflection might actually decrease with age, whereas anxiety might increase with age (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Anxiety versus Reflection.

As a consequence, if an employee feels reflection or anxiety when thinking about the organiza- tional death, three main-factors are presumed to influence the outcome of this thought process, namely the External Rate of Ageism, including governmental policies and societies, as well as an organizational society adapting to it, the Internal Rate of Ageism, translated as the "orga- nizational mindset" in which the employee exists, and the Stability of Identity, which includes the employee’s attitude towards retirement and work, future plans, and the social network out- side of the work context. With both, the external and internal rate of ageism lying out of the employee’s direct control, the influence on the identity through helplessness might be even stronger. Since the own organization also represents the in-group, it buffers the external rate of ageism for the employee. Table 1 shows the assumed outcomes of Organizational Death Awareness for high and low rates of ageism, with a positive operator indicating a high rate.

Table 1. Influence of external and internal rates of ageism.

In line with research about leadership theories (Schaubroeck et al., 2012; Hoch, Bommer, Dulebohn, & Wu, 2018), the identity of an employee is more influenced by the organizational mindset, the in-group, than through external factors such as governmental practices or compet- ing organizations, the out-group (Haslam, Oakes, & Turner, 1996; Turner, 2010). Neverthe- less, external factors will have an influence on the organizational level, at which employment contracts are constructed around governmental policies or strategies of other companies are copied or assimilated.

Death Awareness in the individual

To turn Organizational Death Awareness into a more tangible construct, the next chapter will draw conclusions from the classic Death Awareness research on the individual level, looking at motivation, health, personality, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Since the life cycle of an employee relates to the natural life cycle, it is assumed that the same rules apply. One might think, that the severity of an organizational death is not even slightly comparable with death itself, whereas for the individual it might be a severe identity-based crisis, in which she or he has to wave the old life goodbye, work-related habits, relationships, and status included.

Motivation

Even though everything we do might be due to the underlying drive of escaping slow disin- tegration, be it cooking a meal, exercising, or writing an exam in order to build a sustainable future (Kets de Vries, 2014), death is mostly ignored in organizational and motivational re- search. With the concept of Death Awareness, the drive of creating something more permanent than the own life becomes the sole motivation in both, reflection and anxiety. From the philo- sophical perspective of Albert Camus (1942/2013), Sisyphos is not punished by the gods, but rather is enjoying his duty, being in control of his doing while not having to find meaning with the burden of freedom on his back. In a sense, the organizational death is equal to Sisyphos los- ing his stone, while having constructed a replacement stone because he knew the time of loss.

This story might be able to indicate the power of temporal clarity in Organizational Death Awareness, motivating the employee to prepare for a meaningful life after the organization, while also raising awareness for the own existence. Without drifting too much into philosophy, research on Terror Management Theory has also shown several links to self-esteem (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010) and extrinsic behavior (Cozzolino, Staples, Meyers, & Samboceti, 2004), whereas Death Reflection shifts extrinsic behavior more towards intrinsic and unselfish behavior (Cozzolino et al., 2004). Under organizational aspects, it might be crucial for the employer to detect tendencies for the upper hand between reflection and anxiety when trying to explain work motivation and social behavior of a senior employee within a team context.

Health

By the nature of its naming, Death Anxiety leads to stressful thoughts about the own mortal- ity. Those stressful thoughts might lead to exhaustion and burnout when seen as a permanent trait (Sliter, Sinclair, Yuan, & Mohr, 2014), while a simple mortality cue might just increase the volition to participate in health benefiting measures (Taubman-Ben-Ari & Findler, 2005). From a theoretical point, the second finding is in alignment with the definition, where self- protection increases with higher Death Anxiety, whereas the first finding is a bit ironic, with the recipient trying everything to protect the self, while simultaneously destroying it. With the desire to create a meaningful life showed in Death Reflection, psychological resources can be enhanced and thus provide protection for mental and physical health (Taylor, Kemeny, Reed, Bower, & Gruenewald, 2000). For a senior employee, this meaningful life can also be fulfilled while mentoring other co-workers, again underpinning the contribution of Organiza- tional Death Awareness for the organization, broadening the toolset of employee support and commitment.

Personality

Very little to no clear research looks at the influence of personality traits on Death Awareness. Most research gathered around the anxiety side, differentiating small differences between un- dergrad students with high and low fear of death (Neufeldt & Holmes, 1979), or indicating, that high neuroticism leads one to flee from bodily experiences (Goldenberg et al., 2006), turning it into a challenge to transcribe these findings to senior employees. Another study investigated the moderating effect of openness to experience on self-defensive mechanisms (Boyd, Morris, & Goldenberg, 2017). Still, there is a research gap for the exploration of a connection between concepts like the Big Five and Organizational Death Awareness. With filling this gap, employ- ers might be able to provide tailor-made retirement (or senior, if euphemisms are preferred) programs, detecting differences early and accompanying the employee on the last third of the work life.

Life & Job satisfaction

When the process of reflection transforms a job into a calling, letting the pursuing person find a deeper meaning to life and work, beneficial outcomes are the logical consequence. Under these circumstances, employees tend to work longer and their reports on higher job satisfaction and life satisfaction go hand in hand (Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997). Often, the calling of an employee might lie outside the boundaries of the current (maybe more traditional) organization. Therefore, the organizational awareness of an employee’s desire and reflective thoughts should be taken into account. Creating a model like Google, where employees are able to spend twenty percent of their time on projects out of their normal work context, might be the key to keep the overall engagement and satisfaction on a high level. Although it is not widely used and can be the reality of 120% work, the idea of being able might just be enough (Bock, 2015).

Death Awareness in the organization

The origin of a mortality cue affecting the organization can vary. Coming from the inside, it could be a co-worker reaching the final year before retirement, whereas an outside cue can be anything, reaching from a commercial about funeral homes to a sick relative. Outside cues are displaying a major threat since they can not be controlled through the organizational culture, but simultaneously are affecting the decision process on the inside. Therefore, the organization itself should develop a kind of Death Awareness, recognizing and supporting employees in times of need.

Leadership

While there is a relationship between the style of leadership applied within an organization and its followers, the opposite is also true. People who are experiencing Death Awareness, especially anxiety, are more drawn to charismatic leaders, showing aggressive politics, and punishing deviant behavior disproportionate high (Cohen, Solomon, Maxfield, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2004; Stein, Steinley, & Cropanzano, 2011). In an additional article, Stein et al. (2011) theorize about the severity and regulation of the punishment situation and transfer it to the decision of a CEO. Where the researched judicial decision underlies an openly accessible rulebook (the law) and happens within the timespan of a lawsuit, the decision of a CEO is more freely and happens on an hourly basis, which makes it a dangerous state if the same relation- ships apply. A leader driven by anxiety would promote opinions consonant to his worldview and dismiss "threatening" ones, thus missing ideas outside of his box. A countermeasure could be ethical leadership in an open and fair environment, supporting not only fairness but also or- ganizational citizenship behavior (OCB; Piccolo, Greenbaum, Hartog, & Folger, 2010). With promoting an organizational culture of support, OCB could also be a functional act against ageism.

Discrimination

Age-based discrimination can come in several forms and severity, from governmental and organizational policies, job ads, to the distribution of tasks or direct hostile behavior. Dis- crimination on the ground of age goes towards both, the young and the old, but discrimination against the old might find part of its explanation in Death Anxiety. According to research about the Terror Management Theory, the self-defense against opposing worldviews can also be a source for the discriminatory behavior of the defender. Whether there are more extremes when evaluating people of the own religion versus people of another religion (Greenberg et al., 1990), or people base their seating distance on nationalities (Ochsmann & Mathy, 1994), an anxious reaction towards mortality salience leads to a stronger bond to the in-group. In an organizational context, this reaction might have several effects. One might be, that a hiring manager will prefer applications from people matching the own culture. Is this cultural differ- ence expressed through age, the younger hiring manager might obtain the mortality cue from scanning the CV of an older applicant, while the senior hiring manager’s reminder might come from being close to retirement. In another situation, a performance evaluation might be more extreme, based on the cultural preferences of the evaluating manager.

Organizational Death Awareness Framework

As a concluding and connecting thought, the framework (Figure 2) was created. Aiming to create a research-friendly basis, it includes the mentioned possible sub-factors in summarizing main-factors. By nature, every description of those main-factors (Stability of Identity, Inter- nal/External Rate of Ageism) will never reach complete truth but may consist out of various sub-factors describing them in the best possible way. When a mortality cue is received, the recipient will experience the state of Organizational Death Awareness, which then has to pass the first evaluative barrier, the Stability of Identity.

Stability of Identity

Essential parts of this construct are the self, the attitude towards retirement and work, future plans, and the social network outside of the work context. A definition could be tied in the same tone as psychological resources, which provide protection against harm through internal or external obtained attributes, such as self-esteem and health, or social support and money (Hobfoll, 2002). As an example for the self, self-esteem either provides protective resources against Death Anxiety or enhances it, depending on the kind of measurement (subtle measure- ment, self-reports) (Burke et al., 2010). In the end, the further processing of a mortality cue is dependent on a resource check from our future self, withstanding the hypothesis, that there is a void after the organizational exit. This stage also starts a constant dialogue with the second stage, the Internal Rate of Ageism.

Figure 2. The Organizational Death Awareness Framework.

Internal Rate of Ageism

In this dialogue, the position of power lies with the organization, displaying either support or ignorance when dealing with employees facing their organizational death. Since ageism can be both, active and passive, it is crucial to measure and describe this form of discrimination in several ways. Looking at the hiring policy, an organization could black out the date of birth and the photo on a CV, leaving only the years of experience as an indicator for the age. To overcome this flaw, quality should surpass quantity and instead of years at an organization, the applicant should be able to express experience, for example, in a 200 characters long text or with a work sample. Furthermore, the hiring process could be enriched with the standard of multiple hiring managers instead of one, as well as the implementation of statistical mod- eling and computer-driven analyses, providing a more objective approach to screening a CV (Jackman, 2004; Senthil Kumaran & Sankar, 2013). Naturally, this leads to a more expensive hiring process, but through this process, the organization not only provides measures against the Internal Rate of Ageism, but it also nourishes the hiring process into a more sophisticated one, able to withstand criticism, legal issues and the pitfall of an individual’s subjective de- cisions. All this, and supposedly more, accumulate to a result, the employee has to evaluate over and over again in order to feel supported or ignored. In the end, the evaluation in each employee in turn also influences the organizational culture in which ageism either grows or diminishes.

External Rate of Ageism

In a similar way in which the organizations displays power over the employee, the government displays power over the organization. This power is expressed through laws and policies with the idealistic goal of creating an organization which obeys and acts without discrimination, although more commonly, inspiring an organization to find loopholes, escaping the authorities. The rigor of those laws and policies can describe one part of the External Rate of Ageism, influencing the organization. Another part is competing and inspiring organizations acting on both ends of the continuum. If a leading organization such as Google publicly announces a new policy against ageism, the odds are high that others will follow. On the other hand, if known loopholes are exploited by role-model companies, others will follow too.

Behavioral Outcomes

Despite the mentioned forms of destructive behavior at work, the exposure to mortality cues can also result in positive or constructive work behavior. With an organization providing an employee with the possibility to find meaning within itself, the need for a change of occu- pation, as seen after the events of 9/11, could be buffered and turned into something useful. Meaning can be found in mentoring other employees, which shows the ability to enhance the career satisfaction of junior employees (Blickle, Witzki, & Schneider, 2009), but also increases their overall job satisfaction through reduced stress and psychological empowerment (Chung & Kowalski, 2012). The worst behavioral outcome for the organization would be the premature withdrawal of an employee, happening through stress and burnout or the desire for a change of occupation. Therefore, it is important to create a culture of support and commitment, detecting signs of Organizational Death Awareness.

Implications for the organizational use

Even though we are living in a recruitment world,  where the term talent  is very en vogue,  an ageing workforce is the reality and is going to affect every organization. With the imple- mentation of this framework, an organization could benefit from keeping experienced workers satisfied, while at the same time providing excellent learning resources for younger employees. As mentioned before, Organizational Death Awareness might have a direct effect on the orga- nizational culture itself, decreasing or increasing the rate of discrimination and thus creating a hostile or friendly work environment. Conclusively, this will have an effect on computable organizational numbers, which are sometimes needed in order to justify the implementation of something new.

Implications for further research

While describing the effects of Death Reflection and Death Anxiety very thoroughly, Grant and Wade-Benzoni (2009) are missing to further explain their interactive nature. To be able to switch states dynamically, might be a key component in being able to detect and negate the negative effects of Death Anxiety. To develop a more robust basis for this framework and in or- der to provide also the organization with the knowledge about an employee’s lifespan, a further examination on the triggering age of Organizational Death Awareness has to be conducted. To further validate the construct, an inventory measuring thoughts about the own organizational mortality might be a key in expanding research on work motivation, job satisfaction, retirement decisions, and age-based discrimination.

Concluding reflections: Is this the end?

Maybe the daily dose of audio-visual exposure to mortality cues through the media made peo- ple already numb and tired towards reflecting about their own death. Maybe the unconscious effect of this daily dose is underestimated and affects our behavior more than we think, reach- ing from social interactions with friends, to the decision if we should hire applicant A or B. An increased openness towards the topic of death and retirement, without the immediate defensive retreat into two opposing camps, could constitute a beginning, rather than the end.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

- Martin Heidegger

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