This thesis investigates how traumatic organizational events involving the organizational identity affect employees. The research sought to clarify employees production of meanings from these events and the implications of identity dynamics in this process. The thesis comprises three studies, each addressing specific research questions. All three studies were based on in-depth interviews and documentary data and had content analysis as an analytical tool. Study 1 was carried out with Vale SA employees after the 2015 Mariana disaster, and investigated the meanings they attributed to the tragedy. The results showed the mobilization of several defense mechanisms, stronger in intensity and number among those still employed and highly identified with the company; Study 2 was carried out with Petrobras SA employees after the 2014 corruption scandal, and analyzed how leaders faced these events as well as the processes by which they responded to the crisis. The results indicate that top management leaders engaged in a sensegiving strategy to repaire the organizational identity, which sought to detach the wrongdoing from it while reinforcing its positive aspects. Middle level leaders assimilated the sensegiving, insofar as it met their own needs for meaning-building and self-defense; Study 3 was carried out with BR Distribuidora employees after the company s privatization in 2019, and unveiled critical elements and processes through which employees give meaning to such a traumatic event. The results suggest that the intensity of threat to the self experienced by employees is connected to the meanings they attributed to the end of organizational identity: as a change - in cases where the threat was perceived as less intense -, or as a loss - in cases where the threat was perceived as more intense. The analyses describes unfolding psicossocial processes of association (found in the literature) and dissociation (which emerged in the study). Resulting meanings seamed to be conditioned by the intensity of threat to the self, regardless the employment status employees mantained after the privatization. The thesis contributes to the investigation of how employees react to traumatic organizational events and how identity processes condition the production of meaning from these events.