How Death Trajectories and Job Satisfaction Impact Responses to a Generationally-defining Event

Constant media coverage of high mortality macro-level events (Fishman, 2017) has made death increasingly salient for all workers. Drawing from event system theory (EST; Morgeson, Mitchell, & Liu, 2015) and transactional stress theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), we examine employee reactions to high mortality events, using the current COVID-19 crisis as our context. We posit that death-related inferences impact employees’ perceptions of an event’s strength characteristics (i.e., novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality), which subsequently determine the event’s impact on employee well-being and behavior. Additionally, given that job satisfaction is utilized as a reference point when employees interpret and respond to their environment, we theorize that high job satisfaction amplifies the effects of an event’s death trajectory on perceptions of the event’s strength. Using a multi-wave investigation of 871 full-time employees, results indicate that perceptions of the event’s novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality depend on both death trajectories (i.e., increases in geographical proximal deaths) and generalized employee attitudes (i.e., general job satisfaction). These findings support the proposed event-systems model of large-scale mortality events.