Organizations and Exposure to Trauma at a Collective Level: The Taxonomy of Potentially Traumatic Events

Abstract

Organizational trauma is a contemporary construct that highlights long-lasting negative psychological consequences of various internal and external events that overwhelm the capacity of people in organizational settings. This chapter proposes that a typology of potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and the taxonomy of these events' attributes can be developed by conducting a comprehensive literature review. The search of databases for the period of 1995-2016 revealed 81 articles on which inductive qualitative content analysis was conducted. Analysis brought three PTEs: events resulting from organizational processes; adverse experiences in trauma-prone occupations/sectors, and catastrophic events caused by economic/social/environmental conditions. These events' attributes appeared distinctive under three themes: features of traumatic events; human behaviours; internal and external organizational environment. As the final step, the proposed taxonomy was applied to real traumatic business cases happened in 2015 and early 2016 so that the taxonomic model was tested.