Every day, individuals are exposed to events that remind them of their mortality, either consciously or subconsciously. For example, watching news coverage of a natural disaster, receiving a cancer diagnosis, or losing a loved one, may spark feelings of mortality salience. Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, few scholars have considered how employees are impacted by these events and why responses to the same event may differ from one employee to the next. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model outlining the employee mortality salience process, including what drives differences in responses for employees.
