How to Come Back Stronger From Organizational Trauma
Traumatic events are destabilizing. In their aftermath, leaders can help individuals and teams recover and grow.
Carolyn Geason-Beissel / MIT SMR | Getty Images
It is a sobering reality of life today that many organizations across sectors and industries will face trauma. My institution, the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), became one of them on Dec. 6, 2023, when a shooting on campus profoundly changed our community.
Trauma is extraordinary, uncontrollable, and overwhelming to those who experience it.1 Its impact is devastating, and it leaves survivors with ongoing pain and loss that cannot be overstated. When we experience trauma, it shatters our belief that the world makes sense, and we consequently feel less safe, less in control, and more vulnerable.2 However, psychology research has also found that as they recover from trauma, individual survivors can experience post-traumatic growth (PTG).3 This process doesn’t minimize the suffering or psychological challenges that survivors encounter but rather taps the “rich and remarkable resources, creativity, and success of the human spirit to adapt, cope, and survive,” in the words of psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman.
While research into PTG has focused on individuals, the possibility that organizations might experience similar effects after a traumatic event is intriguing. This article aims to provide an overview of current thinking about organizational trauma and explores the question: In the aftermath of trauma, how might leaders help their organization move forward to collectively survive — and even engage in learning and growth that surpasses its pretrauma state?
Understanding Organizational Trauma and PTG
Events that cause trauma for organizations are catastrophic, life-threatening, or life-altering, and disrupt core functions; their causes can be either internal or external.4 They include incidents such as workplace violence, natural disasters, and terrorism. Organizational trauma is both distinct from and related to what we define as a crisis: Many traumatic events are crises, but not all crises are traumatic events. An organizational crisis — such as a financial scandal, major product recall, or consumer boycott — may challenge members’ beliefs about the organization and its mission, but trauma is akin to an earthquake that displaces members’ sense of the world and their collective place in it.
As referenced above, research over the past two decades has found an emergent pattern in survivors’ stories: transformative psychological changes as a result of struggles in the aftermath of trauma.
References (16)
1. R.M. Vogel and M.C. Bolino, “Recurring Nightmares and Silver Linings: Understanding How Past Abusive Supervision May Lead to Post-Traumatic Stress and Post-Traumatic Growth,” Academy of Management Review 45, no. 3 (July 2020): 549-569.
2. R. Janoff-Bulman, “Assumptive Worlds and the Stress of Traumatic Events: Applications of the Schema Construct,” Social Cognition 7, no. 2 (June 1989): 113-136.
