ABSTRACT
Death, death awareness, and mortality play salient roles in organizational life and in the aging process. We start the chapter by exploring death and mortality from the social sciences and humanities’ perspective. Our discussion of works in personality and life-span development provides an alternative perspective of death awareness and mortality. Whichever of those two key perspectives about death awareness and mortality are adopted, both have relevance and implications for the workplace. We explore when and how death and death anxiety become salient to employees in organizational settings, and outline some of the negative implications such as temporary to permanent withdrawal from the job. We discuss how dealing with death experiences can also have positive consequences for employees’ self-awareness, motivation, and generative behaviors. Channeling generative behaviors through organizational processes such as mentoring and sponsoring programs can be greatly beneficial to younger and less experienced employees and managers. We argue that death reflections are effective means for reality check ups as they help you realize what really matters in life.
