Despite Peter Frost’s (1999, p. 128) call for organizational scholars and practitioners to “find suffering as a significant aspect of organizational life,” both have largely remained silent about it. This silence misrepresents the fact that suffering is a pervasive, inescapable, and costly organizational reality. Suffering matters, and a recognition of our general inattention to it exposes an under-appreciated shortcoming of established theories and approaches to management. We must acknowledge, account for, and explicitly investigate suffering if we are to truly understand the full humanity of organizational life. Accordingly, this paper outlines promising areas for future research on suffering in organizations.
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