How a Parent’s Workplace Injury Can Shape Future Leaders

When workers are injured on the job, companies typically focus on getting them back on the line or in the office. Workers’ compensation kicks in, rehabilitation starts and HR tracks the return-to-work process. What almost never gets attention are the kids quietly taking it all in at home.

The experience of witnessing a parent suffering from a workplace incident can shape a child’s psychological development and future capacity for leadership. Whether they end up scarred or strengthened hinges largely on how they process the experience and what happens at home afterward, according to a newly-published study. 

Struggling to make sense of their new reality can restructure how children see themselves, and, for many, leadership becomes part of that new identity. 

“Psychological distress involves a lot of thinking, and part of it is intrusive thoughts and rumination,” says Alyssa Grocutt, a postdoctoral associate at the Haskayne School of Business who recently completed her PhD work at Smith School of Business. “But when this thinking is also used to make sense of the event and reshape schemas about how the world works, restructure thoughts about the self, relationships with others and perspectives on life, that’s where the growth happens. 

Foundation for growth

Grocutt’s views on post-traumatic growth among children with a parent injured on the job grew out of two studies she conducted with colleague Julian Barling of Smith School of Business. They went into the studies believing that, for children, witnessing a parent’s workplace injury would violate fundamental expectations about work — the assumption that parents leave for work each day and return home safely.

If a child perceived a parent’s injury to be particularly significant, the researchers believed the violation would trigger psychological distress in the form of intrusive thoughts and avoidance behaviours. They would struggle to process what happened; for many children, this cognitive struggle would become the foundation for post-traumatic growth. 

To test their model, Grocutt and Barling designed two studies that involved 468 young adults from Canada, the United States and the UK who had a parent injured in a workplace safety incident when the study participants were between ages three and 17. They focused on children’s perceptions of injury severity: how visible the injury remained and how much pain they witnessed their parent experiencing.

Both studies employed time-separated surveys, with participants first reporting on the injury, their distress and growth experiences, then returning a week later to complete leadership assessments. The time separation made it harder for people to subconsciously make their answers match. 

The first study confirmed their initial views. Injuries that children perceived as severe predicted greater distress. Greater distress predicted greater post-traumatic growth. Greater growth predicted stronger leadership identity. And leadership identity predicted actually taking on leadership roles. 

Age did not seem to change the story. Whether kids were in early childhood, middle childhood or adolescence when their parent got hurt, the same pattern held. Age at the time of injury did not alter the relationship between distress, growth and emergent leadership.

Family factors loom large 

The transformation does not happen automatically or in all cases. The researchers’ second study identified two family factors that make or break whether children move from distress to growth.

First, authoritative parenting — being warm and supportive while maintaining structure and expectations — strengthens the path to post-traumatic growth. When parents managed to stay responsive and nurturing despite their own injury and recovery, their children were more likely to process the trauma constructively.

That is easier said than done. “It is possible that the strain from being injured could impede some of the ability to maintain this parenting style and a stable home environment,” Grocutt acknowledges. “But I think this is where external supports are important to consider too.”

The second factor is household chaos. When homes lack routine and structure, especially after a disruptive workplace injury, children struggle to transform their distress into growth. The relationship weakens as chaos increases.

It is not about maintaining the same routines from before the injury. “The pre-injury daily routine may not be possible post-injury,” says Grocutt, “but can the family come up with a new routine that will help provide structure to each day?”

The findings align with resilience theory, which emphasizes that external resources and supportive environments enable children to overcome adversity. Yet they also highlight a concerning reality: injured workers struggling with their own recovery may find it difficult to provide the kind of parenting approach and household stability that their children need most. 

Research imitating life

Grocutt’s research interest stems from direct experience. At age 11, her father was killed in a workplace incident. The tragedy sparked her passion for workplace safety advocacy: She began speaking publicly about safety at age 12 and has incorporated that mission into her personal and professional identity ever since. 

Yet that personal journey also revealed a variation in outcomes. “I did my best to take this traumatic event and turn it into something meaningful with advocating for workplace safety,” she says. “However, I noticed that a few peers with similar experiences were struggling and did not seem to experience that growth. This observation is what made me interested in looking at positive outcomes, and what can help move children towards those outcomes.”

The research challenges the assumption that experiences of childhood trauma are necessarily negative, as events children need to overcome to succeed. These studies show it’s more complicated.

“It’s important to remember that a variety of life experiences can contribute to development that’s applicable to professional settings,” Grocutt says. “For example, it’s not just the shiny leadership programs that help build skills useful for our professional lives, but also the personal experiences, whether adverse or more normative.”

Need for an organizational re-think

This perspective should prompt organizations to reconsider how they think about leadership development and workplace injuries. Companies implementing development programs might consider how to help emerging leaders reflect on and extract meaning from challenging life experiences. Mentoring relationships provide space for discussing how adversity shaped identity and capabilities.

As for rehabilitation and return-to-work programs, most focus exclusively on the injured employee, treating workplace safety incidents as isolated events affecting individual workers. Such a narrow focus overlooks the broader family impact.

“I think involving families in some capacity is important,” Grocutt says. “For example, family counselling or having the family attend some of the sessions in rehabilitation so that everyone can understand and learn about the injury and how best to support each other.”

Workers’ compensation boards could play a valuable role. These systems already coordinate rehabilitation services and manage return-to-work processes. Expanding their scope to include family support — counselling parents on maintaining authoritative parenting approaches post-injury, helping families establish new routines, providing children with age-appropriate information about the injury — could lead to better family outcomes.

Several questions remain for future research. The studies did not examine workplace fatalities or the most severe injuries, leaving open whether the same pathways apply in those cases. Nor did they establish causality. Alternative explanations remain possible; personality characteristics, for example, could influence both how children process adversity and their later leadership emergence.

Still, the findings offer a foundation for reconsidering how organizations, workers’ compensation systems and the affected families approach workplace injuries. Rather than treating these incidents as isolated events affecting individual workers, a broader perspective would acknowledge the family systems involved and the potential for both negative and positive long-term consequences for children.