Abstract:

Mortality cues, ubiquitous inside and outside the workplace, are specific events and experiences that trigger individuals’ death awareness, whose double-edged effect on employee performance has been supported by a body of studies. Existing studies have explained this effect drawing on terror management theory and generativity theory. Studies from the perspective of terror management have indicated that individuals' death anxiety will induce their self-protection motivations, which in turn predicts their work withdrawal behaviors such as absenteeism, turnover, and so on. On the other hand, studies from the perspective of generativity theory have suggested that individuals will actively reflect on their long-term life meaning in the face of mortality cues, and generate prosocial motivations that motivate them to make profound contributions to society, which in turn promotes their positive work behaviors such as helping others in the workplace. However, given that some studies have found that death anxiety has a positive effect on employee performance, and each of the above perspectives focuses on explaining a single effect of mortality cues, previous studies still fail to provide an overarching theoretical explanation for the key question “how and when does mortality cues have a double-edged effect on employee performance?”. Building on the unified perspective of transactional stress theory, this current review systematically sorts out the double-edged effect of mortality cues on employee task performance, organizational behavior, and counterproductive behavior, then analyzes the psychological mechanism and boundary conditions of this double-edged effect. Specifically, mortality cues can be conceptualized as a stressor both impeding and facilitating individuals’ personal goals and well-being, and individual's different cognitive appraisal (i.e., threat-based vs. challenge-based) of mortality-cues-based stressors will produce differential state death awareness (i.e., state death anxiety vs. state death reflection) and work behaviors. When it comes to appraisals of mortality-cues-based stressors, the threat-based appraisal of mortality-cues-based stressors will hinder their task performance and organizational citizenship and cause counterproductive behavior via state death anxiety, and the challenge-based appraisal of mortality-cues-based stressors will facilitate employee’s task performance and organizational citizenship behavior via state death reflection. In addition, this double-edged effect is also moderated by personal resources such as trait death reflection, psychological power, trait mindfulness, and promotion focus, as well as organizational contextual factors such as servant leadership and internal corporate social responsibility. Both personal and organizational contextual resources will strengthen the positive relationship between mortality-cues-based stressors and the challenge-based appraisal of mortality-cues-based stressors, and weaken the positive relationship between mortality-cues-based stressors and the threat-based appraisal of mortality-cues-based stressors. Explaining the double-edged effect of mortality cues from the perspective of transactional stress theory has both theoretical and practical implications. In particular, the perspective of transactional stress theory not only captures the interaction between objective mortality cues and individuals’ subjective cognitive appraisals, but also provides an overarching explanation for the generation of different state death awareness and its subsequent double-edged effects on employee performance. The divergence between death anxiety and employee performance may also be clarified by the theoretical insight that cognitive appraisals of mortality-cues-based stressors are a dynamic process. Practitioners can also conduct some intervention programs based on the above theoretical framework to help employees cope with mortality cues more adaptively. Future research can further explore antecedents and causality in the mechanism of the double-edged effect of mortality cues, testing the theoretical validity of mortality cues as a new type of stressor and clarifying whether the generation of state death awareness depends on cognitive appraisals of mortality-cues-based stressors or not. In addition, future research can also examine whether there are boundary conditions related to cross-domain contextual resources such as family intimacy, and develop more organizational intervention programs ranging long-term mindfulness intervention to short-term nudge strategies.

Key words: mortality cues, death anxiety, death reflection, transactional stress theory, employee performance