Grief in the organizational sciences: Critical analysis of a conceptual transfer
In organizational literature, the notion of grief is used, or simply evoked, in order to make sense of the “emotional” reactions of some actors facing losses in their professional lives. The purpose of this paper is to question the theoretical and epistemological foundations surrounding the legitimacy of this analogy (induced by a specific conceptual transfer) and the limits of its validity in the empirical practice of academic research. The first part of this paper will identify and categorize studies which engage the concept of grief in the organizational sciences. The second part will define the concept of grief and the theoretical demands that this definition imposes upon the management researcher. The third part aims to show the diversity of grief theories and the difficulties in using this eclecticism in organizational science. Finally, in the fourth part, we will seek to pinpoint the theoretical limitations of the grief stage theories that are the most leveraged in our field.