Hot, cold, or both? A person-centered perspective on death awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic—as an omnipresent mortality cue—heightens employees’ awareness of their mortality and vulnerability. Extant research has identified two distinct forms of death awareness: death anxiety and death reflection. Because researchers have exclusively examined death anxiety and death reflection as independent and unique variables across individuals while overlooking their interplay and co-existence within individuals, we know little about whether and why employees can have different combined experiences of two forms of death awareness over a certain period of time (e.g., during the pandemic), and how these different employee experiences relate to theoretically and practically important work-relevant consequences. To address this gap in our knowledge, we adopted a person-centered approach using latent profile analysis to consider death anxiety and death reflection conjointly within employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two studies, we identified three distinct death awareness profiles—the disengaged, calm reflectors, and anxious reflectors—and found membership in these profiles systematically varied according to health- (e.g., risk of severe illness from COVID-19), work- (e.g., job-required human contact), and community-related (e.g., the number of regional infections) factors influencing the self-relevance of COVID-19 as a mortality cue. In addition, we found that these death awareness profiles differentially predicted important employee outcomes, including well-being (i.e., depression and emotional exhaustion) and prosocial behaviors at work (i.e., organizational citizenship behaviors and pro-diversity behavior).