Memento Mori: The development and validation of the Death Reflection Scale

Despite its potential for advancing organizational behavior (OB) research, the topic of death awareness has been vastly understudied. Moreover, research on death awareness has predominantly focused on the anxiety‐provoking aspect of death‐related cognitions, thus overlooking the positive aspect of death awareness, death reflection. This gap is exacerbated by the lack of a valid research instrument to measure death reflection. To address this issue, we offer a systematic conceptualization of death reflection, develop the Death Reflection Scale, and assess its psychometric properties across four studies. Further, using a sample of 268 firefighters, we examine whether death reflection buffers the detrimental impact of mortality cues at work on employee well‐being and safety performance. Results provide strong support for the psychometric properties of the Death Reflection Scale. Further, moderation analysis indicates death reflection weakens the negative effect of mortality cues on firefighters' safety performance. Overall, these findings suggest the newly developed Death Reflection Scale will prove useful in future research on death‐related cognitions

What happens when employees are furloughed? A resource loss perspective

Furloughs refer to placing employees on a temporary leave with no pay for the period of the leave. The current study draws from conservation of resources (COR) theory to examine how furloughs affect employees’ experiences of burnout, work–family conflict, and life satisfaction. Results gathered from 212 individuals show that being furloughed during the 2013 U.S. federal government shutdown was associated with perceived personal resource loss, which was related to decreased life satisfaction and increased work–family conflict and physical, cognitive, and emotional burnout 5 weeks after the shutdown ended. The relationships between furlough status and all outcomes were fully mediated by perceived resource loss. Our findings show that furloughs can and do negatively affect employees and that these effects last long after the furlough has ended

Unexpectedly Pursuing Employment in a New Country: How Refugees Overcome Vocational Barriers

Symposium presented at the annual Academy of Management Conference: Virtual. Progra

Crossing the Line: Disgust, Dehumanization, and Human Rights Violations

What leads Americans to support human rights violations? The authors explore the role of disgust on dehumanization and support for retaliatory human rights violations, including support for torture, targeting noncombatants, and extrajudicial killing. Using a survey experiment, the authors find that American respondents are disgusted with outgroups whose behaviors violate global human rights norms. These feelings of disgust lead respondents to dehumanize these outgroups and support hypothetical human rights violations against past violators as well as noncombatants ostensibly affiliated with them. Although the experimental vignettes also triggered anger and sadness in participants, only disgust reactions consistently produced dehumanization and support for human rights violations against outgroups. The results indicate that global human rights norms delineate not only acceptable behavior toward others but also the boundaries between those deserving and undeserving of human rights protections