How aid‑worker trauma insights can strengthen workplaces

“Many professionals face persistently traumatic situations, and they can include financial traders facing continued losses or managers forced into waves of redundancies affecting hundreds or even thousands of employees. But few traumatic situations are as severe as professionals based in areas riven by war, famine or other seemingly impossible situations. The trauma faced by volunteers for the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) provides the setting for research by 2 Cambridge Judge Business School faculty members, Associate Professor in Strategy and International Business Madeleine Rauch and Professor of Strategy and Innovation Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, that provides important insight into how people cope with such situations – and their findings have implications beyond such conflict or other troubled zones. “Trauma is often more acute in life-and-death settings such as war zones, but the coping mechanisms we examined in conflict areas also apply to offices and other less extreme workplace environments,” says Madeleine. Dr Madeleine Rauch Professor Shaz Ansari Why employee engagement is a life-or-death issue for NGOs The research focuses on how professionals in such “morally draining settings marked by persistent trauma and a sense of futility” cope by temporarily anchoring their experiences in the past or future, in order to reinterpret their current situation. Specifically, the research identifies 3 ‘reframing influences’ that allow such professionals to deal with the traumatic situation and to remain engaged over time, which is a big issue given turnover in such stress-filled roles. “NGOs often rely on volunteers to do their critical work so retention is critical,” says Shaz. “We identify different ways of coping in traumatic situations and the implications for whether people return for a second or subsequent mission, so these are important findings for such fieldwork-based organisations.” The psychology behind coping: what is Construal Level Theory? The study published in the Academy of Management Journal builds on Construal Level Theory (CLT), which explains how people construe experiences concretely or abstractly depending on their psychological distance from the situation. Using CLT as a base, the research examines how such temporary anchoring techniques influence whether people affected by trauma return to fieldwork in difficult areas or redirect their energies elsewhere including to policymaking and other systemic change. When traumatic experiences in the present become uninhabitable, professionals can ‘manipulate’ their experience by stepping out of the present. “Building on CLT, we reveal that professionals actively draw on different past and future horizons depending on their perceived psychological distance,” the research says. “We show that when traumatic experiences in the present become uninhabitable, professionals can ‘manipulate’ their experience by stepping out of the present and ‘traveling’ toward a temporal horizon that allows meaningful engagement.” While many jobs entail stress and difficulty, coping takes on new dimensions when trauma is so persistent and unrelenting to make detachment and distance difficult. The research behind the research: boredom, silence and drone warfare The research builds on previous studies by Madeleine and Shaz, including in war-torn areas such as South Sudan and other stressful military settings. These include a study by Madeleine that explores how UN peacekeepers deal with boredom during hours-long patrols in which nothing happens, a look at how silence can help people maintain focus in life-saving and other critical work, and research that looks at how remote military drone operators operating thousands of miles from their targets deal emotionally with such lethal work. In addition, both faculty members have focused for many years on different aspects of framing, or the use of strategy that allows organisations and individuals to promote issues or interpretations in a way that advances their goals. “Framing provides a very useful context to our look at how people cope with trauma in such difficult settings,” says Shaz. “People develop different coping mechanisms based on how they interpret the situation, their role and goals both personal and organisational – so framing provides a really suitable mechanism for examining this.” From Rwanda to the classroom: how this research was born No amount of training can fully prepare someone for encountering the realities on the ground. Madeleine says she became particularly interested in how people deal with trauma through her time as a young scout in 1994 at Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland, Germany and Austria. “At the time, the 100-day genocide in Rwanda was unfolding, something I had no real framework to understand. As part of the scouts, we organised fundraising efforts to support humanitarian missions in Rwanda, and that experience stayed with me. It sparked an early curiosity about how people organise and operate under extreme circumstances, and what it takes to provide support in such contexts. “Over time, that curiosity developed into a deeper academic interest in trauma, particularly among those involved in delivering and coordinating humanitarian responses. Through my own field experience, I’ve seen firsthand that going into the field – whether in Afghanistan or South Sudan – can be deeply formative, however, returning home is often far more challenging. You cannot unsee what you have witnessed, and those experiences leave a lasting imprint. No amount of training can fully prepare someone for encountering the realities on the ground: severely malnourished children, the aftermath of extreme violence, or young boys drawn into conflict.” The 3 coping strategies that help workers survive traumatic jobs The reframing practices reflect people who are: 1 Pragmatic recalibrators Pragmatic recalibrators revisit traumatic events in the recent past to extract meaning from situated experiences and focus on the concrete, actionable ‘how’ of work in the near future. Among the diary entries of people in this category: “Let’s be practical about what we can achieve here.” “Dreams are great, but this is not a place to dream but to get work done.” “Feasible care is better than ideal care”, so we should prioritise “survival over perfection”. 2 Grounded idealists Grounded idealists draw on distant-past ideals while focusing on the ‘how’ of what could be achieved in the near future. Among diary entries of individuals that fall into the grounded idealist category: “No grand strategic objectives. … I focus on my own impact, what we can do with this mission in the very moment.” “There is so much wrong around you. So much you cannot control. I stopped thinking about all the things that I cannot do like changing the entire healthcare system. I’m not equipped to do that, and that’s not why I’m here.” 3 Visionary reorienters Visionary reorienters draw on such distant-past ideals but also project meaning into a distant future motivated by the abstract ‘why’ of the need for long-term systemic change. Among the diary entries of this group: “The primary duty of healthcare is to alleviate suffering… Every human life has its own unique value… It is my sense of duty to society.” “We are planting the seeds for a better tomorrow for the children here. But tomorrow is not as a tomorrow. It’s not even the day after tomorrow. The tomorrow for a better future here is maybe 2055.” Which coping style brings volunteers back – and which drives them away The different approaches by the 3 groups had various consequences once they returned home to their normal lives, which has implications for MSF’s retention rate as only half of volunteers return for a second mission. Specifically, pragmatic recalibrators and grounded idealists had a 100% rate of return for a second mission, while visionary reorienters had only a 16% retention rate – and the research also found that people in the first 2 categories are also far more likely to sign up for more than 2 missions. MSF relies mostly on volunteer doctors, nurses and other medical professionals who take a leave from their regular jobs for 3-month or 6-month stints in dangerous settings where kidnapping and violence threats often confine them to immediate work environments. Typically, MSF operates about 130 simultaneous missions in more than 30 countries. “We recognised stark differences among the groups. Some individuals stressed the importance of a specific mission and ‘just getting the work done there’, while some stressed the importance of building MSF stronger across missions, and others stressed the need for system change and criticised MSF’s limited impact,” says the research. “This suggested that individuals in each pathway adopted different mechanisms to sustain engagement, such as through local issues, capacity building, systemic change and policymaking.” How organisations can protect staff from workplace trauma Organisations should include training in psychological first aid to help employees cope and remain engaged. Madeleine offers some further advice to organisations whose employees are in situations that may cause trauma: “Organisations should manage sustained exposure to trauma as a preventive measure in such contexts. For example, organisations should avoid back-to-back high-intensity assignments in demoralising contexts and allow for sufficient recovery time between assignments. In settings where high-intensity work is ongoing, periodic breaks or sabbaticals may be necessary. “While first aid training is well established across organisations as part of their pre-assignment trainings, they should also include training in psychological first aid to help employees cope and remain engaged. Overall, organisations can encourage journaling as a voluntary practice to help employees articulate difficult experiences and find a workable way to keep contributing and to reframe their experiences.” Inside the data: diaries, interviews and field trips The study was based on 73 unsolicited diaries of volunteers deployed by MSF on missions in such extreme locations as Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Uganda and Yemen – which Madeleine and Shaz describe in the research as “ideal settings in which to explore how professionals cope with trauma in demoralising contexts”. They add that the MSF context is especially well-suited to studying how professionals cope because they face “feelings of futility especially acute” due to persistent trauma, resource scarcity and profound limits on their ability to make an impact. The diaries were complemented by 2 waves of interviews with the diarists, in 2017 and 2024, in order to understand the longitudinal implications of emotional trauma, as well as field trips by Madeleine joining MSF delegations and other institutions in Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. From war zones to office floors: lessons for every workplace While the study was conducted in the context of humanitarian work, the authors say the temporal reframing may also be used in more commonplace work settings in which individuals face persistent trauma – such as beleaguered financial traders, employees facing abusive supervision or managers forced to make difficult decisions. The study also specifically cites gig workers who “frequently rely on focusing on the near future to navigate precarious work conditions”, and whistleblowers fearing retaliation who may align with visionary reorienters drawing on “distant future visions to sustain their belief in making a difference”. The study even has implications in the field of scholarship and how academics deal with the emergence of generative AI: some respond as pragmatic recalibrators in making short-term adjustments to work with AI, others “sustain purpose by returning to scholarship ideals amid AI-driven work”, and still others resemble visionary reorienters by seeking to reimagine “the entire educational landscape itself”. For all organisations, the study teaches the importance of maintaining the connection to how their work contributes to the risk of disengagement or leaving – so the authors urge organisations to help individuals regain a sense of contribution through, for example, supporting practices such as voluntary journaling that can “help employees find a way to keep contributing, even when conditions themselves remain difficult.” Featured faculty Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari Professor of Strategy and Innovation View Shaz's profile Madeleine Rauch Associate Professor in Strategy and International Business View Madeleine's profile Related content Rauch, M. and Ansari, S. 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