What Business Psychology Tells Us About Grief at Work
By Miguelle James.
Abstract
Grief is inevitable in life, yet largely invisible at work. While organisations rely on policies to manage bereavement, these rarely address the psychological reality employees carry back with them. Drawing on Business Psychology frameworks, this article argues that grief is not simply a private disruption, it is an organisational experience that demands a more sophisticated response. It explores how loss affects cognition and perceptions of support, and examines the critical role of leadership in shaping employee experience. Ultimately, it calls on Business Psychology practitioners to lead a more honest, human-centred conversation about how our workplaces respond to loss.
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Introduction
Workplace bereavement is often framed as a logistical matter: a policy to follow, a leave allowance to calculate, a box to tick before someone returns to their desk. Yet social psychology shows us that people's sense of being valued is shaped far more by daily interpersonal cues than by formal procedures (Fiske, 2011). In other words: how an organisation responds to grief lives or dies in the moments between the policies.
I say this from both a professional and personal place. I recently experienced a loss and in navigating that grief, I found myself reflecting not only as an individual but through my lens as a Business Psychologist.
In a previous piece for The ABP, I explored micro-affirmations: the small, everyday signals that tell people whether they are truly seen within an organisation. Grief brings that work into its sharpest possible focus. When someone is bereaved, those signals become heightened; they communicate, powerfully and memorably, whether the organisation views them as a whole person, or simply as a resource that needs to return to productivity.
The Psychological Reality of Grief: Beyond the Stages
The public understanding of grief has long been shaped by the Kübler-Ross model – The Five Stages of Grief: a framework that, while valuable in normalising bereavement as a psychological experience, has also encouraged a more linear narrative. Something predictable, containable and finite, that people move through and emerge from.
Contemporary research tells a more complex story. The Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut, 1999) describes bereavement as an oscillation between loss-oriented coping, attending to the emotional weight of the loss, and restoration-oriented coping, attempting to re-engage with daily life. People move between these states fluidly, sometimes within the same hour.
Without this understanding, organisations frequently misread the signals. A bereaved employee who seems functional one day and distracted the next is not being inconsistent, they are grieving. Bereavement also produces measurable cognitive effects (Bonanno, 2007), including:
- Impaired attention
- Reduced working memory
- Compromised decision-making
These are not peripheral concerns; they sit at the very heart of workplace functioning, and they persist well beyond the boundaries of formal bereavement leave.
Why the Organisational Response Is Never Neutral
Psychological Contract Theory (Rousseau, 1989) describes the unwritten, felt sense of reciprocity between employee and organisation. It is one of the most important lenses through which to understand what is actually at stake when someone returns to work bereaved.
How an organisation responds when an employee loses someone sends a signal that is rarely forgotten. A thoughtful, human response reinforces the belief that the organisation sees the person behind the role. A procedural or indifferent response, even one that technically complies with policy, can quietly but significantly fracture trust. Organisations often underestimate how much psychological contract damage costs them, partly because it is rarely attributed to its real cause.
Karl Weick's sensemaking framework (1995) adds another layer. Grief is, by its nature, a profound interruption to an individual's meaning structures. It disturbs assumptions about identity, continuity, and what can be relied upon. Returning to work while grieving means attempting to reconstruct normality within an environment that has continued at pace, one that may feel, from the bereaved individual's perspective, jarringly unchanged.
What organisations and colleagues do in that space matters enormously.
Leadership as a Grief-Responsive Practice
Edmondson's work on psychological safety (1999) is well established within our field. Environments where people feel able to express vulnerability are environments where people perform better, recover faster, and stay longer. Grief is one of the most acute forms of vulnerability an employee can bring to work, yet it is also one of the experiences most likely to be met with avoidance.
The reason is usually discomfort; managers fear saying the wrong thing, so they say nothing. They default to professionalism as a form of protection. Compassionate leadership, as defined by West et al. (2017), involves noticing suffering, responding with empathy, and taking thoughtful action. None of this requires a manager to become a counsellor. However, it requires them to be present, to acknowledge, and to check in consistently: not just in the first week back, but in the weeks that follow.
Three organisational priorities stand out:
- Reframing grief as an organisational reality rather than a personal inconvenience;
- Investing in leader capability alongside policy and compliance; and
- Redesigning return to work as a supported transition rather than a resumption of duties.
Grief Is Everybody's Business
Organisations are, fundamentally, human systems. People bring their whole lives to work: their ambitions and anxieties, their relationships and their losses. For me, the psychology and the lived reality point to the same conclusion. The signals we send to a bereaved person at work, however small, communicate something they will carry for a long time. Whether they were seen and whether they mattered.
As Business Psychology practitioners and leaders, we have both the knowledge and the responsibility to shape how workplaces respond to loss.
Perhaps the most valuable question we can each ask is: When someone I work with is grieving, what will I do today that tells them, "You are more than your output here. You are seen."
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About the Author
Miguelle James is an experienced People and Culture leader with over 20 years of expertise in HR and Organisational Psychology. As Head of People & Culture at SYTECH, she shapes culture, builds high-performing teams, and aligns people strategy with business growth in the digital forensics sector. A practising Business Psychologist, Miguelle specialises in cultural transformation, leadership development, and wellbeing initiatives. With a strong background in diversity, equity, and inclusion, she is passionate about creating workplaces where people feel they belong, thrive, and are valued for their uniqueness. Miguelle believes people are the foundation of business success.
References
Bonanno, George. (2004). Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience. American Psychologist. 59. 20-28. 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20.
Edmondson, Amy. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in teams. Administrative Science Quarterly. 44. 250-282.
Fiske, Susan. (2010). Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Comparison Divides Us. The American psychologist. 65. 698-706. 10.1037/0003-066X.65.8.698.
(1989). Psychological and Implied Contracts in Organisations. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal. 2. 121-139. 10.1007/BF01384942.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description. Death studies, 23(3), 197–224.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organisations. Sage Publications.
West, M., Bailey, S., & Williams, E. (2020). The Courage of Compassion: Supporting Nurses and Midwives to deliver high quality care. The King's Fund.