Abstract
When women in leadership experience career disruptions, they and their organizations lose. Companies forfeit experienced, mission-aligned talent, while women face instability and professional setbacks. This qualitative study offers a diagnostic foundation for understanding how organizational communication contributes to these disruptions. Guided by the cultural approach to organizations and using a constructivist grounded theory methodology, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with 14 mid-career women who experienced career interruptions. Findings identify three interrelated communication-related factors: mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence. Rather than prescribing solutions, the study centers on women’s lived experiences to highlight the communication patterns they perceive as harmful. This interpretive focus is intentional: before designing effective interventions, organizations must recognize and reflect on the dynamics women themselves identify as destabilizing. Only by listening to these accounts can we begin to imagine more supportive workplaces, and only through this imagining can we keep women from reaching their career breaking points.
Keywords
Organizations benefit greatly from female leadership. Companies in which women hold at least 30% of leadership roles are 12 times more likely to be top financial performers (Kruse, 2023). Employees with female managers also report gains from women’s strong creative abilities and their skill in fostering team cohesion. Despite these advantages, women remain underrepresented in leadership. Although they make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce (Schaeffer, 2024), women hold just 42% of management positions, and their representation drops sharply at senior levels (GAO, 2023).
Increasing female representation in leadership is clearly important. Yet as organizations work to promote more women into leadership roles, they face another urgent challenge: retaining the mid-career women who have already overcome systemic barriers to get there. Even after reaching leadership levels, many women encounter persistent obstacles (Almeida & Salas-Betsch, 2023), which can lead to departures from established professional paths, whether voluntary (e.g., resignations) or involuntary (e.g., layoffs).
While these challenges vary by industry and role, the cultural approach to organizations suggests that all workplaces are shaped by communication, both formal (such as leadership messaging) and informal (such as peer interactions) (Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983). Said another way: Organizational communication is not a neutral force; rather, it can either support or undermine women’s careers. Research has linked gendered communication norms to career stagnation and eventual disruption (Masdonati et al., 2022; Vaz et al., 2023). However, few empirical studies have explored how women themselves perceive and experience communication as a factor in their career trajectories.
This study uses the cultural approach to organizations lens to examine the question: How do mid-career women perceive organizational communication as a factor contributing to career disruptions? Career disruption is defined here as a significant shift in one’s professional path, whether by choice or circumstance. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, this study explores how formal and informal communication practices may contribute to career derailment. It identifies three interrelated communication-based factors: mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence (misalignment between personal and organizational values). By centering women’s lived experiences, this research reveals how workplace communication may, intentionally or not, push women toward career-breaking points.
Understanding these communication-driven disruptions is essential for organizations that aim to retain and support women in leadership. Without deliberate efforts to promote transparency, inclusivity, and psychological safety in workplace communication, organizations risk sustaining environments that drive women out of leadership pipelines. This study contributes both to organizational communication scholarship and to practical strategies for building more equitable workplaces by empowering organizations to identify harmful communication patterns in their own cultures.
Literature Review
While research has explored the barriers women face in professional settings, the specific role of communication in shaping career disruptions remains under examined. This literature review draws on organizational communication scholarship and gendered leadership studies to examine how culture, as enacted through communication, contributes to burnout, gaslighting, and value misalignment, three interrelated forces contributing to mid-career women’s career disruptions.
Communication, Culture, and Career Disruptions
Organizational culture is constructed and sustained through communication, both formal and informal (Geertz, 1973; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983). From leadership messaging to hallway conversations, communicative acts create webs of shared meaning that influence how individuals perceive their roles, relationships, and value within the organization. Cultural norms surrounding overwork, silence, and deference are often embedded in communication patterns, shaping whose voices are heard and whose concerns are dismissed. In this context, mid-career women navigating leadership roles may experience heightened pressure to conform to implicit expectations that are rarely named but widely understood (Banwart, 2020).
Recent studies underscore the importance of communication in shaping professional trajectories. For example, Masdonati et al. (2022) highlight how relational dynamics and ambiguous organizational signals can trigger involuntary career changes, particularly for women in leadership. Similarly, Vaz et al. (2023) describe how cultural factors such as exclusionary practices, gendered expectations, and limited transparency contribute to disillusionment and career exits. These patterns are not merely procedural breakdowns. They reflect deeper cultural messages about who belongs, who leads, and who must adapt.
Burnout as a Cultural Phenomenon
Burnout is often understood as a symptom of excessive workload, but its roots are communicative and cultural. Research shows that organizations frequently reward constant availability and emotional labor without recognizing the toll such expectations take, especially on women (American Psychological Association, 2023; Kuhl, 2022; Maslach et al., 2001). Cultural messages like “going above and beyond” are often transmitted through leadership praise, peer comparison, and unspoken norms that discourage boundary-setting. These cultural scripts, which are deeply embedded in organizational communication, normalize overextension and silence resistance. As Seierstad and Kirton (2015) argue, even in progressive workplace contexts, policies and discourses often contradict each other, leaving women to navigate unrealistic and conflicting expectations. In this way, burnout emerges not only from workload but from the cultural meaning assigned to how work should be performed and who is expected to carry it.
Gaslighting as Communicative Control
Gaslighting in the workplace, though increasingly recognized, is still understudied from a communication-centered perspective. Graves and Spencer (2023) suggest that, in fact, “communication scholars are uniquely positioned” to add depth to the “study of gaslighting” (p. 136). Defined as a form of manipulation that causes individuals to doubt their perceptions, gaslighting operates through subtle communication tactics of denial, dismissal, or deflection that discredit a person’s reality (Adams et al., 2023; Kukreja & Pandey, 2023). In organizational contexts, this behavior often arises when power is concentrated and leadership avoids accountability, allowing informal communication norms to override formal protocols. Gaslighting is a secondary microaggression, according to Johnson et al. (2021). “Microaggressions,” are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue et al., 2007, p. 273). Gaslighting is a secondary microaggression that can be expressed verbally, exacerbating the situation for the target just as victim blaming or “splaining” does (Johnson et al., 2021).
For mid-career women in leadership, gaslighting undermines credibility and fosters a culture of silence, where speaking up becomes risky. Rodrigues et al. (2021) emphasize that when organizations fail to support targets of gaslighting, especially women and people of color, the damage extends beyond individuals to the culture itself. The communicative atmosphere becomes one of mistrust and psychological harm, signaling whose voices can be safely expressed and whose are routinely invalidated.
Value Incongruence and Meaning-Making
Another critical theme in women’s career disruptions is value incongruence, when personal values no longer align with the culture communicated by the organization. While value alignment is often cited as a retention factor, its breakdown is rarely explored as a communicative process. Participants in recent studies reported that unclear messaging, shifting priorities, and inconsistent articulation of mission or goals made it difficult to feel a sense of belonging or purpose (Fouad et al., 2023; Visentini et al., 2023). In the absence of transparent communication about values and direction, employees must interpret culture through informal signals, which can breed confusion and mistrust.
This process is deeply symbolic. As Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo (1983) suggest, stories, rituals, and shared language within organizations function as indicators of what truly matters. When those symbols begin to contradict personal meaning systems, employees face a choice: adapt, resist, or exit. For many women in this study, career disruption became a necessary act of self-preservation in the face of cultural dissonance.
Despite growing attention to issues like burnout and gaslighting, most existing research, if it emphasizes communication at all, treats it as a functional tool rather than a cultural force (see Table 1). This study centers on communication as a symbolic and sensemaking practice, highlighting how organizational culture is not simply experienced but actively constructed through the stories, silences, and norms that shape everyday workplace life.
Selected Existing Research’s Key Findings on Women’s Career Advancement and Associated Gaps in Understanding Organizational Communication and Workplace Culture.
Theoretical Framework
This study draws on the cultural perspective of organizations as its theoretical framework. The cultural perspective builds from Geertz’s (1973) notion of culture as “webs of significance,” highlighting how people create and share meanings that form the basis for collective understanding. Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo (1983) extend this idea to organizational contexts, describing organizations as dynamic systems where culture is continuously constructed, communicated, and maintained through everyday interactions among members. Rather than viewing organizations merely as sites of task completion, this perspective emphasizes the wide range of communicative behaviors occurring within the workplace, including informal exchanges such as gossip, humor, avoidance tactics, and social gatherings. From this viewpoint, communication in informal settings like planning a casual office event is as critical to organizational culture as formal interactions, such as performance evaluations.
Culture, therefore, is not simply imposed top-down by management but emerges organically through a variety of symbolic expressions and practices, including language use, stories, rituals, and metaphors that serve as “indicators and displayers of organizational sense-making” (Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983, p. 124). Ethnographic analysis of these communicative acts can reveal the deeper values and assumptions that shape how organizations function. This approach moves beyond traditional, quantitatively driven models that link communication with measurable organizational outcomes (e.g., productivity or survival) and instead prioritizes understanding how communication itself constitutes organizational life and meaning.
The Current Study
The cultural perspective on organizations provided a rich, interpretive lens for understanding the complex communicative dynamics shaping women’s career experiences. Guided by constructivist grounded theory, which emphasizes inductive inquiry grounded in participants’ lived realities, this framework sensitized the analysis to how meaning-making processes within everyday organizational communication contribute to career disruptions. This theoretical-methodological alignment led to the research question: How do mid-career women perceive organizational communication as a factor contributing to career disruptions?
Methodology
This study adopted Charmaz’s (2014) constructivist grounded theory approach, which emphasizes the interpretive and co-constructed nature of theory building. Constructivist grounded theory views data, analysis, and resulting theory as mutually shaping and privileging participants’ lived experiences while also recognizing the researcher’s role in meaning-making. This methodology was especially appropriate for exploring the nuanced, context-dependent experiences of mid-career women navigating career disruptions. Rather than applying a rigid formula, this approach allowed for iterative data collection, flexible coding, and ongoing theoretical development grounded in the perspectives of participants.
Data Collection and Participants
Following Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, the study employed purposeful, nonprobabilistic sampling to identify information-rich cases of mid-career women who had experienced significant career disruptions. The inclusion criteria required that participants:
Identify as female.
Have experienced a career disruption leading to a substantially different professional trajectory.
Were between 32 and 55 years old at the time of their career disruption.
Had at least 3–5 years of experience in their professional field prior to the disruption.
A combination of convenience and snowball sampling facilitated participant recruitment. The initial pool of participants was identified through the researchers’ professional networks, followed by a referral process in which participants recommended others who met the study criteria. Additional recruitment efforts included outreach via social media platforms most likely to be used by women in the target age range, specifically LinkedIn and Facebook.
This recruitment resulted in a total of 14 interviewees (see Table 2). The interviewees were women aged 35 to 54, employed across various sectors including higher education, technology, healthcare, and non-profit organizations at the time of their career disruptions. On average, these women experienced career disruptions approximately 4 years into their roles. The mean duration of their overall workforce participation ranged from 21 to 25 years. Within the sample, two participants were individual contributors to their organizations, 10 occupied middle management positions, and two held executive leadership roles during the period of their career disruption. Participants’ career disruptions varied in nature, with some experiencing voluntary transitions, while others faced involuntary disruptions (e.g., forced exits due to organizational politics or restructuring).
Interviewee Pool Demographics and Frequency.
After verifying eligibility, participants provided written informed consent before scheduling a semi-structured interview conducted via Zoom. Each interview lasted approximately 60 min. In line with Rubin and Rubin’s (2012) qualitative research best practices, the researchers established a conversational rapport with participants, beginning with discussions about their current professional roles and career goals before proceeding to the core interview questions. A structured question bank, informed by the literature review, guided the interviews (see Table 3). Probing questions were used as needed to elicit deeper insights.
Semi-structured Interview Question Bank for the Research Question, “How do Mid-Career Women Perceive Organizational Communication as a Factor Contributing to Career Disruptions?”.
Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed to ensure accuracy. Throughout the interviews, researchers took field notes. To protect participant confidentiality, each was assigned a non-identifying code (e.g., Participant 1, Participant 2), which was used for recordings, transcripts, and data reporting.
Data Analysis
Grounded theory as an approach is often criticized for the opacity of its data analysis. The Ünlü-Quershi framework (Qureshi & Ünlü, 2020) was applied during the current study to address this concern, as the researchers analyzed their findings in four iterative stages: coding, concept identification, category development, and thematic analysis.
During each interview, both researchers independently recorded emergent codes. Afterward, they met to compare notes, identify shared codes, and categorize them within a developing code tree. These categories and codes were refined iteratively and structured in Dedoose (see Table 4).
Example Researcher Notes on Emerging Codes, Concepts, and Categories for the Research Question, “How do Mid-career Women Perceive Organizational Communication as a Factor Contributing to Career Disruptions?”.
To enhance trustworthiness and reduce bias, participants were invited to review and confirm the accuracy of their assigned codes. This member-checking process ensured that participants’ perspectives were faithfully represented without introducing researcher bias. For example, if an interviewee discussed both formal and informal communication, they reviewed a subset of the code tree relevant to their responses, avoiding exposure to unrelated themes that could influence their feedback.
Once all interviews were completed, anonymized transcripts were uploaded to Dedoose for systematic coding. The researchers independently applied the established code tree to ensure consistency and reliability in coding. Discrepancies were resolved through discussion and consensus-building, reinforcing the rigor of the analytical process. The researchers then met via Zoom to discuss themes and ultimately formed a theory based on the codes and categories.
By following these systematic data collection and analysis procedures, this study contributes a grounded understanding of how organizational communication influences women’s career disruptions and identifies strategies perceived as effective in mitigating their impact.
Results
Analysis of this study’s data revealed three interrelated stages that comprise the career disruption cycle for mid-career women: mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence (misalignment with organizational values and personal values).
Mission-Driven Overwork
Participants in the study identified negative communication patterns within their organizations, characterized by inconsistent formal and informal messaging and a pervasive lack of communication. These deficiencies were reported to contribute to mission-driven overwork and its resulting burnout among the participants. Participant 6 shared, “We ended up being the last group to learn of things. It has a huge trickle-down effect on business standards, but [in] also auditing, so there was a lot of risk. It left our team feeling alone.” Participant 3 recalled, “You know how you can tell one’s open to your ideas or feedback, or if it seems like, on the surface, maybe they are, but it doesn’t seem genuinely that they care.”
Participants also indicated leadership’s messaging tone and timing contributed to feelings of mission-driven overwork. Participant 1 shared: With Slack, for instance, you can see [a] green light who’s on and who isn’t, and there’d be times where I admit I burnt the midnight oil especially early on, and I remember my boss, the CEO at the time was like. ‘Oh, like I love that I see your green light on.’ It was like 7:30 or 8:00 pm and I was still in the office physically, but kind of commenting like, ‘Oh, Participant 1’s like a hard worker,’ which, like I was like, oh, that’s kind. That’s nice that he recognizes that, but there were some colleagues that needed to close the computer and go home and take care of their families. There’s nothing wrong with that. They still did their job.
Participant 14 remembered situations of mission-driven overwork as well: “Again I was starting to not love my job, because of the pressure. The pressure was extreme. Even if we hit our targets, it was never enough, and you never were doing enough. So that was really getting to me, probably where I was ready to move on.” Participant 13 described her work environment: “It was extremely, extremely toxic, a negative lack of communication, and I felt like I was constantly going to be fired.” Participant 7 shared similar sentiments: And so I think if I’m being honest, like, communication has to be one of the top reasons that you move on anyways right, whether it’s communication with your direct coworkers, or direct supervisor, or your leadership, or whatever I mean, it really comes down to a breakdown in that communication, and I think that that is like I could probably pinpoint that as being the problem for each of my moves.
Mission-driven overwork contributed to escalating feelings of stress and burnout. This progression was associated with enduring self-diagnosed trauma, depression, and both physical and mental health concerns. Participant 3 recalled feelings of not being able to leave the office: “You know, my supervisor’s supervisor was needing more, and that would create stress for me that I think, well, can I really be gone, or do I need to make sure that these things are happening?”
Participant 9 shared physical health concerns she experienced before her career disruption: “I’m killing myself and I’m losing weight. I’m working in the evenings. I’m trying new things with the team and you know, supervising a team isn’t easy. But I was doing all these things about to kill myself and burnout was real.”
Participant 11 linked these experiences to COVID: “I think COVID just changed things a lot for a lot of people, whether that be expectations, whether that be the roles that we were taking on, and I think that maybe top leadership, maybe I’m being kind, but I think that top leadership didn’t always understand all of the excessive roles that folks had to bring on.”
Participant 2 contributed her thoughts: “I definitely felt burnt out at times. I mean, of course. I was with the organization during the pandemic and there was a different leader in place at the time, and I also had a different supervisor at the time. So that was when I first started to experience, burnout, because, you know, at the time I, my son, had just turned one, and there really wasn’t a whole lot of work to do, but it was like we had to pretend we had work to do. And there was this, I felt like there was this facade that we had to keep up, and everyone kind of knew that we didn’t really have fundraising work to do. But we had to like, justify, do things to justify our salary.”
Participant 6 shared: “At first, they were very supportive and they were like, ‘Oh, your daughter can just join the meeting’ and at first, I was like, well, this is great. Then I guess maybe I reached a point where this isn’t fun, she [my daughter] has a fever, and she’s on the couch behind me while I’m on a call with a client. I just think that there weren’t healthy boundaries.”
Burnout and career disruption results in trauma that persists for women long after they have exited their previous roles, whether they have taken a career hiatus or transitioned into new positions, with participants sharing the following experiences: Oh, definite trauma. Yes, and depression. And so yeah, honestly, I took a full year. It was a full year off, maybe even a tiny bit more than that, off. I did apply for very few jobs, actually. But honestly, I probably didn’t leave my house much (Participant 14). I think there was burnout and it’s taken me a while to get over it. I don’t think I’m honestly over it, and I think that it wouldn’t have been so bad had I not gone through the trauma that I had experienced with my supervisor. And the sad thing is, it wasn’t just me. There were a couple other people in our office, who were also going through it. (Participant 13). I think as organizations, and even just like culture and society, we need to be asking ourselves questions like what expectations are we placing on women? That are unrealistic? Because in some part it is the organization’s duty and job to make sure that these expectations are realistic and communicate that properly. But how is society and culture as a whole. feeding this narrative that women need to do everything, be everything. I actually had a frozen shoulder that resulted from some of the stress that took about a year to rehab, and studies show that women are more prone to this. (Participant 1)
Gaslighting
In addition to identifying deficient communication patterns within their organizations, participants in the study reported experiencing gaslighting from peers or supervisors. This phenomenon was found to significantly impact their mental health, undermine confidence in leadership, and ultimately contribute to considerations of making a drastic career change.
Participant 10 recalled: “My supervisor twisted the entire conversation to the point that I got in trouble for some things that I never even said, or if I didn’t agree with the executive director, I would be scolded, let’s say, for having my own opinion. If I would go against the organization, I would be written up, scolded.” Participant 12 shared a similar experience: I was having some conflict in the office with my supervisor and some other employees. I had taken those concerns to my supervisor multiple times at least twice. I feel like I was, for lack of a better term, gas lit into thinking it was all in my head. There was nothing going on. So I kind of backed off and just assumed that I was the problem. I was, you know, the one imagining things. Then I had others in the office come to me with similar concerns. Since I was in a leadership role, I felt like I needed to bring those concerns forward. So I decided to move above my supervisor to that person’s supervisor. And I feel like it. Just kind of snowballed from there.
Participant 1 reported experiencing gaslighting daily: “I can’t deal with this. I can’t handle this level of mind games. I didn’t know what I’d be walking into every day.” Participant 5 echoed those sentiments: I took time off for my mother’s passing and helping her, and I knew it frustrated my peer, but I was reporting to leadership and I made a comment to leadership that my fear and concern was that while I’m being told yes, we’ll work with you, take as much time as you need, I will be dumped on later. I will be punished. Leadership approached him on that, and he came back and told me, oh no, I’d never do that, and damned if he didn’t. So yeah, I was penalized later for taking the time.
Value Incongruence 1(Misalignment with Organizational Values and Personal Values)
According to the interviewees, negative communication patterns among employees created misalignment with leaders and the organizational values. This misalignment with organizational values emerged as the third theme found for women encountering career disruptions. Participant 4 shared, “There was not always clear direction in what our office was supposed to be doing, and that was certainly a source of frustration.” Participant 6 recalled, “Yeah, I don’t think that they [leadership] knew what their values were prior to the acquisition. We did. But then, being acquired, it kind of was very confusing.”
Participant 9 shared, “I think everyone is really smart about not getting anything in writing. There really wasn’t anything written, you know, and if there was, it was very vague. There was no transparency, [and it] left a lot of people wondering. But then it sometimes it was like, I know who they’re talking about, you know, or it’s just not very like, let’s get to the point here, you know so I would say, unclear, lots of chatter rumors, you know. What’s true? Would you hear? Kind of thing, which is just, not good for the workplace at all?”
Finally, Participant 8 shared, “At the time I felt like poor leadership was the strategy because they were trying to have people self-select out. And it just did nothing. It just wasted a bunch of time. To be honest, it would have been better to just say, here’s what you’re gonna have to do. Here’s what your new job’s gonna be. Do you want to do that or not like it? Then the mental games and the like PTSD that so many people have like leaving.”
As women encountered the complexities of negative communication patterns, mission-driven overwork, and organizational gaslighting within their workplaces, these experiences prompted critical reflections on personal values and goals, ultimately leading to career disruptions, when their personal values and that of the company did not align. Participant 3 described her decision to undergo a career disruption: “I made a decision that was probably best for me personally with my family, with my health and that prompted me to think that that was a good time to make a decision. It would be more adaptive for my life.”
Participant 1 shared, “When I was in these conversations, mostly informal with my boss, there was this theme of like verbiage that was being used that felt just very demeaning. I just remember being like, this is the kind of person that I want to be like. I want [them] to be my mentor or somebody that I learned from and at first it didn’t become clear because I was wide eyed, like ready to lean in, wanted to learn. And then these themes of ways of communicating [were happening] that felt kind of demeaning.”
Participant 9 recalled, “But there is a component of, I would say advocacy and when you, when you know that you’re capable of so much as a young professional. You kind of just have to make that decision. And I had communications and conversations like, I said internally about things that were really bothering me, or what I was experiencing. But again, at the end of the day the people who needed to make a move just kind of turned a blind eye.”
Discussion
Using the cultural approach to organizations as an interpretive framework (Geertz, 1973; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983), this study reveals how formal and informal communication practices do more than transmit information. They also construct and reinforce the symbolic systems that define organizational life. Participants described cultures marked by ambiguous expectations, inconsistent messaging, exclusion from decision-making, and manipulative communication. These patterns were not isolated managerial oversights but reflections of shared, normalized assumptions about value, power, and participation within the workplace.
Through this lens, mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence emerge as cultural expressions, or norms embedded in everyday communicative acts that signal who belongs, whose labor is recognized, and whose voice matters. These patterns align with research on gendered communication norms and organizational expectations that pressure women to demonstrate constant availability and self-sacrifice (Masdonati et al., 2022; Seierstad & Kirton, 2015). As Geertz (1973) suggested, culture is a “web of significance” that individuals themselves spin. Here, the threads are communicative: praise for late-night activity, silence in the face of overwork, and implicit rules that discourage dissent.
Mission-driven overwork, the first stage in this disruption cycle, was reinforced by communication norms that conflated dedication with exhaustion. Participants were socially rewarded for exceeding boundaries, even when such behavior undermined their health or disrupted their work-life balance. These findings build on literature showing how unrealistic expectations and the absence of open communication exacerbate burnout, particularly among women leaders (American Psychological Association, 2023; Kuhl, 2022; Maslach et al., 2001). Rather than being a result of individual inadequacy, burnout in this context was a cultural product. It was an outcome of norms embedded in what was said, unsaid, and symbolically rewarded.
In the second stage, gaslighting emerged not merely as interpersonal manipulation but as a systemic, culturally enabled communication breakdown. Participants described being dismissed, discredited, or penalized for speaking up, with leadership often minimizing their concerns. These findings reinforce Kukreja and Pandey’s (2023) argument that gaslighting in the workplace thrives under ambiguous communication norms and inconsistent leadership behavior. When organizational culture devalues open dialogue and fails to hold individuals accountable, manipulative practices become structurally sustained. As several participants noted, the absence of clear processes for validating concerns made them question their own experiences, which was an outcome with significant psychological and professional costs (Adams et al., 2023; Aurangzeb et al., 2023).
Value incongruence, the final stage, reflected a deeper cultural rupture. Participants described a growing disconnect between their personal ethics and the behaviors communicated (explicitly or implicitly) by their organizations. Whether through vague messaging, unspoken agendas, or shifting priorities, organizations failed to communicate a consistent sense of purpose. These findings align with Visentini et al. (2023) and Fouad et al. (2023), who emphasize how perceived breaches in the psychological contract, especially around values, can prompt career exits. In the absence of meaningful dialogue, women in this study were left to interpret opaque organizational signals, ultimately leading many to disengage or depart entirely.
Across all three stages, communication is revealed not as a neutral transmission of information but as a cultural act that shapes professional identity, inclusion, and legitimacy (Cornelissen, 2023; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983). Organizational silence, vague leadership discourse, and exclusionary rituals were not random or insignificant; they constituted the very culture that pushed women toward their career breaking points.
This study extends prior literature by showing how the symbolic dimensions of communication—who speaks, who listens, and what is publicly acknowledged or ignored—inform women’s decisions to leave. As Banwart (2020) and Northouse (2019) argue, inclusive leadership is not merely a matter of policy but of communication style and organizational storytelling. When those stories silence dissent, erase contributions, or reward unsustainable behaviors, the resulting culture drives attrition.
To counteract this, organizations must move beyond compliance or surface-level diversity statements and engage in cultural introspection. This involves examining how communication practices, including metaphors, rituals, informal norms, and everyday conversations, symbolically reinforce inclusion or exclusion. As this study demonstrates, when communication fails, so does culture. When culture fails, women leaders pay the price. And when women leaders leave, organizations lose out.
While existing research has explored barriers to leadership advancement, fewer studies have examined the role of communication in career derailment and disruption. The current study’s findings align with prior scholarship on gendered communication norms in organizations (Northouse, 2019; Tannen, 2017), reinforcing the notion that communication is not a neutral force but a mechanism that can either enable or obstruct career progression. The presence of gaslighting in workplace interactions further supports the growing body of literature on organizational toxicity and psychological safety (Kukreja & Pandey, 2023). The study also extends existing burnout research (Maslach et al., 2001) by demonstrating how workplace communication, particularly exclusionary leadership messaging and dismissive interactions, exacerbates exhaustion and disengagement among mid-career women.
Additionally, the study’s findings contribute to the literature on values alignment and career decision-making. Prior research suggests that when employees perceive a disconnect between their personal values and those espoused by their organizations, they are more likely to disengage (Visentini et al., 2023). Our study builds on this by showing how communication failures, such as lack of transparency and inconsistent messaging, amplify feelings of misalignment, prompting women to reassess their career paths.
The insights from this study provide a foundation for organizational self-inquiry, not a roadmap of best practices. Grounded in the scope of its research question—How do mid-career women perceive organizational communication as a factor contributing to career disruptions?—this work seeks to illuminate how communication is experienced by those whose careers have been derailed or delayed, not to prescribe corrective actions. The goal is diagnostic: to document the communicative dynamics that women themselves identify as harmful or unsustainable. This focus is especially important given the relative absence of scholarship that explicitly examines the role of organizational communication in contributing to career disruptions. Before researchers and practitioners can propose effective solutions, we must first understand how communication contributes to the problem in women’s own words and through their lived experiences.
One area these findings invite reflection on is the set of communication norms that reinforce mission-driven overwork. Organizations might ask themselves: How are we symbolically rewarding overextension? What implicit messages do we send about commitment, availability, and value? Who absorbs those messages most deeply? When late-night emails, public praise for self-sacrifice, or the glorification of exhaustion become normalized, they signal that burnout is a badge of honor, not a warning sign. These are not isolated messages; they are part of a broader communicative culture that disproportionately burdens women, especially those in mission-oriented roles.
The study also reveals how communication surrounding feedback, concerns, and dissent may compound feelings of gaslighting or alienation. When mid-career women raise issues or express misalignment, are their concerns engaged with openness and consistency, or are they met with defensiveness, deflection, or silence? However subtle, inconsistencies between what leaders say and do can create an environment where employees begin to doubt their own perceptions. This communicative erosion of trust does not always stem from intentional harm; it often stems from ambiguity, avoidance, or a lack of clarity about how to respond.
Finally, the findings suggest that values misalignment is not merely a philosophical issue but a deeply communicative one. Organizations may publicly champion certain ideals, but if those ideals are not consistently enacted or communicated internally, the disconnect becomes a source of disillusionment. Mid-career women in this study described feeling trapped between their own ethical commitments and the organization’s opaque or shifting priorities. When values are communicated vaguely, inconsistently, or contradictorily, employees lose the ability to orient themselves and, eventually, may choose to exit entirely.
This study does not attempt to fix these problems. Rather, it argues that they must first be seen, named, and better understood. In doing so, it positions communication not as a peripheral concern but as central to the architecture of organizational life, the very medium through which culture is built, experienced, and, at times, broken. By attending to the lived realities of mid-career women, we begin the necessary work of surfacing a problem that has long gone unspoken. Only then can we begin to imagine how communication might also be part of the solution.
Limitations and Opportunities for Future Research
This study is intentionally limited in scope to offer a diagnostic foundation for understanding how organizational communication contributes to career disruptions among mid-career women. The purpose has been to document and interpret women’s lived experiences, rather than to prescribe practical solutions. This distinction is deliberate. Before interventions or best practices can be designed, there must be a fuller understanding of the communication patterns women themselves identify as harmful. Only by surfacing these dynamics—in their own words—can more supportive and sustainable organizational environments be envisioned.
Because this study uses a constructivist grounded theory approach, the findings are not intended to be statistically generalizable but to provide deep insight into a specific population: white, U.S.-based mid-career women. Although thematic saturation was achieved, the homogeneity of the participant pool limits the broader applicability of the conclusions. Intersectionality is a critical factor in how communication norms are experienced, and future research must explore how race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and cultural context interact with organizational communication to shape career trajectories. Women of color, LGBTQIA2S+ professionals, and individuals working in global or non-Western organizational settings likely face distinct communicative patterns and pressures that merit focused study.
Another limitation is the exclusive focus on the mid-career phase. While this provides depth into a pivotal but understudied stage of professional life, it does not address how communication-driven disruptions emerge in earlier or later stages. A longitudinal or comparative design could examine how perceptions of harmful communication shift across career phases (i.e., early career, mid-career, and late career) and how their cumulative impact evolves over time.
Additionally, while this study identifies three core contributors to career disruption—mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence—it does not evaluate the relative frequency or severity of these dynamics. A mixed-methods approach could complement the current findings by quantifying the prevalence of these risks across industries, roles, or identity groups. Such work would offer organizations a clearer roadmap for prioritizing interventions.
Finally, the study is grounded in a single theoretical lens: the cultural approach to organizations. While this framework enabled a rich, interpretive understanding of communication as symbolic practice, future research could benefit from theoretical triangulation. Integrating perspectives from organizational justice theory, social exchange theory, or intersectionality could deepen understanding of how power, identity, and perceived fairness shape communicative experiences and career decisions.
These limitations define the scope of the current study while laying a clear path for continued research. Building on this diagnostic foundation, the next phase of our inquiry will explore the question: What organizational communication interventions do mid-career women perceive as most effective in preventing career disruptions? The current study sought to understand the problem from the inside out; the next will focus on solution-building. It will still be grounded in women’s perceptions but aimed at identifying practices that support long-term success. By anchoring intervention design in women’s lived realities, future research can help ensure that communication strategies are not only well-intentioned but also meaningfully effective.
Conclusion
This study offers a communication-centered diagnosis of mid-career women’s career disruptions, drawing on the cultural approach to organizations and constructivist grounded theory to surface how meaning-making within the workplace contributes to overwork, alienation, and ultimately, exit. Communication is examined not as a neutral conduit for information but as a symbolic system, one that signals who belongs, what is valued, and when dissent becomes dangerous.
Three interrelated patterns—mission-driven overwork, gaslighting, and value incongruence—emerged across participants’ accounts. These dynamics were not isolated incidents but culturally embedded, sustained through leadership discourse, implicit norms, and everyday interactions. Together, they created environments in which women felt overextended, discredited, or misaligned, all conditions that contributed to career-breaking points.
Rather than prescribing solutions, the findings provide insight into how organizational communication can destabilize careers. This interpretive, experience-centered focus addresses a critical gap in both scholarship and practice by foregrounding communication as a driver of disruption, not just a mechanism for coordination. Before effective interventions can be developed, the communicative patterns that erode career sustainability must be identified, understood, and acknowledged.
The study invites organizations to reflect on the symbolic messages embedded in their communication practices, whether that’s praise for overwork, silence in the face of dissent, or inconsistent messaging about values and purpose. Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward building more inclusive and supportive cultures.
Building on this diagnostic foundation, our next phase of this study will shift from identifying harmful patterns to investigating perceived solutions, still through the forefronting of women’s own words. The current study suggests that communication contributes to the problem; the next will explore its potential to be part of the solution, and considered together, both will ultimately help women avoid career breaking points.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
IRB Approval
Fort Hays State University (FHSU) Office of Scholarship and Sponsored Projects deemed this study exempt from federal requirements for Institutional Review Board approval according to exemption category #2. The Assumption University Institutional Review Board approved FHSU serving as the IRB of record for the project. All participants provided written informed consent prior to participating. All identifying information has been removed, and pseudonyms have been used through the study.
