What is it about?
Millions of workers take leaves of absence each year for reasons ranging from having a baby to recovering from illness to serving in the military, but returning to work after these breaks can be just as challenging as the reason for leaving. Despite how common this experience is, researchers have studied each type of leave in isolation, making it hard to draw broader conclusions. This paper reviews 264 studies across eight different leave contexts and proposes a unified five-stage framework including preparing to return, confronting the new reality, actively coping, settling back in, and evaluating the experience, to explain what returning workers go through, regardless of why they left.
Featured Image
Photo by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We synthesize research across eight very different types of work absence, from parental leave to incarceration, and show for the first time that they all follow the same underlying psychological process. This matters because organizations are currently flying blind, applying piecemeal solutions to what is actually a universal human experience. Our five-stage framework gives researchers and practitioners a common language and a practical roadmap for supporting the millions of workers who return from leave each year.
Perspectives
This project has been deeply personal for our team. Much of the lead author's career has been spent studying working mothers, and there was always a sense that what they experienced returning from maternity leave was connected to something much bigger. Bringing together research on veterans, cancer survivors, formerly incarcerated individuals, and so many others confirmed that hunch in a way that was genuinely moving. These are people navigating some of the most profound transitions in human life, and yet organizations often treat their return as a checkbox exercise. We hope this framework helps change that, and we hope it signals to researchers that there is a rich, largely untapped area of inquiry waiting to be explored.
Jamie Ladge
Boston College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Resocialization as a lens to understanding workplace reentry transitions: An integrative conceptual review., Journal of Applied Psychology, April 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/apl0001384.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
