Social lunch -- Dr. Angelica Leigh (Duke University).

Mega-threats, negative large-scale diversity related events that receive significant media attention, have important consequences for individual's cognitions, emotions and behaviors. In this talk, I will introduce new theory and present results from multiple studies that explains the psychological consequences of mega-threats, namely identity threat – for individuals that share identity group membership with those targeted and/or harmed by mega-threats. I then demonstrate that this threat spills over into the workplace, leading racial minority employees to engage in a process of emotional and cognitive suppression that I characterize as identity labor. Finally, I demonstrate that this process of identity labor has detrimental effects on employees and ultimately organizations, by leading employees to engage in higher levels of task and interpersonal withdrawal in the days following a mega-threat. Taken together, this work yields important theoretical and practical implications about the significant influence that societal events have on employees at work.