Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

769

Date

2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Concentration

Management

Committee Chair

Rabi S. Bhagat

Committee Member

John Amis

Committee Member

Marla Royne Stafford

Committee Member

Frances Fabian

Abstract

Most individuals experience considerable emotional pain and grief due to the death of someone near and dear to them in their lifetimes. These painful experiences have the potential to affect individually-valued and organizationally-valued outcomes. In most organizations, employees are provided with a very limited amount of time for coping with the grieving process before they are expected to perform the normal duties and responsibilities associated with their work roles. Even though we know that the process of grief associated with the loss of a loved one can have traumatic consequences for the employee, there is little in the research literature, especially in the organizational setting, dealing with the effects of this phenomenon. In this dissertation, I explore the following: 1.) the meaning of personal grief in a sample of individuals who are employed in different organizations in a mid-south city, and 2.) the consequences of these experiences on individually-valued and organizationally-valued outcomes such as job satisfaction, job involvement, work performance, and coordination of work related duties with co-workers and supervisors. I collected data in a qualitative mode, employing in-depth interviews with these individuals, and utilizing content analysis to identify meaningful patterns. The objective was to develop insights into the processes that are involved in the way personal grief affects work outcomes. It is hoped that the findings from this study will shed additional light into the effects of extreme stressful life events on organizationally-valued outcomes.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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