Disability, professional isolation and career attitudes

Abstract

Employees with disability-related communication impairments can experience isolation from professional connections which can negatively affect their careers. Management research suggests that having lower quality leader relationships can be an obstacle to employees with disabilities development of professional connections. However, in this paper we suggest that lower quality LMX relationships may not be uniform hurdles for the professional isolation of employees with disability-related communication impairments. In contrast to previous research, we suggest that poorer quality LMX relationships are more detrimental for the professional isolation of employees with less severe, rather than more severe, communication impairment. We expect this to be the case because employees with more severe communication impairments are more likely to disidentify from and have lower expectations for professional connections as self-protective coping strategies. With a sample of 181 deaf and hard of hearing employees, we find that employees with less severe communication impairments report feeling more isolated than employees with more severe communication impairments, and in turn report lower career commitment and career satisfaction. Moreover, the effects of communication impairment severity on professional isolation only hold in lower quality LMX relationships. In a second study of 81 persons with various common disabilities, we find that one possible explanation underlying this resiliency effect of communication impairment severity is that communication impairment is associated with disidentification with professional connections. Overall, our findings suggest that more severe communication impairment may produce resilience against isolation from professional connections.