Social exclusion at work and suicidal ideation: investigating the social pain and psychological pain pathways at work

Social exclusion at work - the denial of social connections in the work domain - is a driver of poor performance and well-being for employees. Answering calls to better understand the antecedents of employee mental health, we propose suicidal ideation as an extreme but critically important outcome of social exclusion at work. We test a framework that integrates the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide and psychache theory of suicide, while differentiating between passive isolation and active ostracism. We hypothesise that passive isolation and active ostracism relate to suicidal ideation via the mediators of thwarted interpersonal needs (representing the social pain pathway) and perceived job insecurity (representing the psychological pain pathway). Across two studies, we find support for the mediating effect of thwarted interpersonal needs and partial support for the mediating effect of perceived job insecurity at the between-person level; however, the results do not support our hypotheses at the within-person level over a daily or monthly timeframe. Our results demonstrate that the integrative framework is useful for understanding the effect of workplace interactions on suicidal ideation, and they indicate that suicidal ideation stems from chronic exclusion rather than relatively short-term upticks. We conclude with insights to encourage the study of suicidal ideation in organisational research.