The role of inclusive leadership in reducing disability accommodation request withholding

<p dir="ltr">Workplace disability accommodations are intended to help level the playing field and create</p><p dir="ltr">more accessible, inclusive workplaces. Yet, research shows that people with disabilities often</p><p dir="ltr">experience insufficient accommodations as a result of both employers’ and employees’ attitudes</p><p dir="ltr">about accommodations. The current work seeks to shed new light on psychological processes</p><p dir="ltr">underlying disability accommodation request withholding. To do so, we draw upon a relational</p><p dir="ltr">framework and use social tuning theory to develop a model examining the relationship between</p><p dir="ltr">inclusive leadership and accommodation request withholding, as mediated by employees’</p><p dir="ltr">perceived disability stigma and moderated by disability severity and relational-interdependent</p><p dir="ltr">self-construal. We tested our model across two studies with Chinese employees – including a</p><p dir="ltr">survey study with three waves of data from 290 employees with physical disabilities and an</p><p dir="ltr">experimental-causal-chain designed vignette study with 526 participants. Our findings indicated</p><p dir="ltr">that inclusive leadership was associated with employees’ lower perceived disability stigma, and</p><p dir="ltr">that was related to reduced accommodation request withholding. Furthermore, this relationship</p><p dir="ltr">was more pronounced in employees with higher disability severity and relational-interdependent</p><p dir="ltr">self-construal. Our research provides novel insights for disability diversity management,</p><p dir="ltr">particularly around the role of inclusive leadership in fostering enabling workplace</p><p dir="ltr">environments.</p>