We are excited to introduce our PDW on Navigating Grief in Organizations: Managing Chronic Illnesses, where we bring together an expert panel of grief scholars and practitioners to continue an important and timely conversation on grief in organizations. Grief is a common human experience resulting from suffering a profound loss, such as the death of a loved one, divorce, and job loss. Building upon the insightful and thought-provoking initial PDW session on grief in the workplace at AOM 2021, we extend the conversation to discuss the grief employees may experience with respect to their (or others’) chronic illnesses—characterized at once as enduring and episodic conditions which involve the loss of health and functioning. In this PDW, our panelists will address some important questions about the intersection of chronic illness and grief, such as:

• How should researchers go about building a research agenda on the intersection between grief and chronic illness at work?

• How can organizations and managers best support their employees with chronic illnesses?

• How can organizations and managers best support grieving employees?

• How can we ensure the perspectives and voices of those with lived experiences with chronic illness are heard and represented in our research and practice?

• How can we reduce the scholar-practitioner gap?

We welcome you to engage with our panelists, their work, and to pose questions ahead of our asynchronous panel discussion, which will later be uploaded on the AOM 2022 Meeting website. In this PDW, academic panelists will weigh in on the research that has been conducted on grief and chronic illness, and identify key directions for future work. Practitioner panelists who work with individuals with chronic illness will share insights on how employees with chronic illness navigate work and their accompanying grief and best practices that organizations should consider when their employees are coping with chronic illness. This conversation will also be interspersed with crowdsourced questions related to grief and chronic illness from Academy members.

With the goal of creating a resource toolkit for Academy members in mind, the organizers will collate valuable insights from the panel discussions and share this PDW website with all interested members of the Academy. So please browse around, pose a question (either in the Community Survey linked here or email any of the organizers), and stay tuned for our panel discussion! If you are attending AOM 2022, join us in person, 4:00 PM - 5:45 PM PST on Saturday, 6 August, SCC: Ballroom 6E. This is a Hybrid event, so if you can't join us in person, please join online, or look for our recording of the discussion after the event.

Finally, we've also put together a virtual-only paper symposium, titled Grief at the Work-Life Interface, at the upcoming AOM. This symposium will feature five projects focusing on grief at the intersection of work and personal life. At the end, our symposium discussant, Dr. Sally Maitlis, will share her insights on this exciting set of papers.

If you'd like to stay in touch with us, please feel free to fill in this form so we can learn more about you & your interests!