Search results

This study aims to review the extant literature on workplace disability inclusion in the organised sector in India and presents an integrated model based on emergent themes in indigenous studies.

The review is directed by the following foci: In what contexts was workplace disability inclusion in India empirically investigated? How was workplace disability inclusion examined (method)? What important themes emerge from the studies? Towards this, empirical scholarly studies in India, published between 2011–2019, is reviewed to identify the evolutionary trends.

Prominent themes have been identified at three levels – organization, group and individual. At an organization level, the focus is on inclusive strategy and practices. Country-specific contextual factors such as legislation, accessibility and external eco-system influence an organization’s inclusive strategy, which addresses how organizations engage with persons with disability (PwD), job mapping, accessibility and targeted recruitment. Inclusive practices span across various phases of the employee life cycle, namely, recruitment, onboarding, development and retention. At the group level, the themes highlight group boundaries, PwD-supervisor interaction, PwD-co-worker interaction and PwD-PwD interaction. At an individual level, PwD experiences are categorized as physical, job-related and psychological. Workplace treatment and experiences of PwD vary from discrimination to inclusion and along with other outcomes, are influenced by contextual factors.

This study contributes to the development of workplace disability inclusion theory, by presenting an integrated model of prominent themes, offering greater clarity and avenues for extending the literature. The paper discusses themes that can help organizations facilitate inclusion, thereby improving employment opportunities for PwD.

In a first, the study provides an integrated account of inclusion of PwD in organized sector in India.

There is dearth of research pertaining to how persons with disability (PWDs) view their career and the issues they face in career development; past studies highlight either the organizational initiatives or individual factors in this regard. The present study bridges this gap by studying the PWDs' experiences and perceptions on challenges in their career development.

An exploratory study through interview of professionally qualified PWDs in India, who have a permanent employment.

PWDs experience that affirmative action has a negative fallout as it leads to positive discrimination and hence, adversely affects their confidence and development.

The present study throws up new themes in the organizational climate that the PWDs face in career development, future studies can understand the aspirations of PWDs toward career and focus on the how the PWDs engage in shaping their career. Researchers can explore strategies that PWDs plan/adopt in creating a sustainable career for themselves. Scholars can also map the issues raised by PWDs with the career outcomes.

The Rights of Persons with Disability Act, 2016, of Government of India introduces a social model of disability in India. This paper deploys the social model of disability to enhance our understanding of the disability climate in India from a new lens.

This study introduces new themes that depict the environmental factors and are related to the organizational climate rather than self-focused issues of PWDs. The paper introduces two new subjective criteria, voiced by PWDs, for career development – a well-crafted capability-based career path and role of inspirational platforms. It introduces hitherto undiscovered issues toward career development, faced by PWDs who have a secure employment and a professional career. This is the first exclusive study of PWDs employed in public sector and thus, brings uniqueness in the context.

Organizations are increasingly investing in disability-specific sensitization workshops. Yet, there is limited understanding about their hoped outcomes, that is, increased knowledge about disability-related issues and behavioral changes with respect to those with a disability. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness and boundaries of disability-specific sensitization training in organizations.

This is an interview-based study where 33 employees from five industries across India were interviewed over the span of a year.

The findings suggest that sensitization workshops are successful with regard to awareness generation. Paradoxically, the same awareness also reinforced group boundaries through “othering.” Further, workshops resonated more so with individuals who already had some prior experience with disability, implying that voluntary sensitization is likely attracting those who have the least need of such sensitization. The findings also suggest that non-mandated interventions may not necessarily influence organizational level outcomes, especially if workshops are conducted in isolation from a broader organizational culture of inclusion.

The present study helps outline effects of sensitization training initiatives and enhances our understanding about how negative attitudes toward persons with a disability can be overcome. The study also indicates how such training initiatives may inadvertently lead to “othering.” Finally, this study offers suggestions to human resource managers for designing impactful disability sensitization workshops.

The purpose of this paper is to describe workplace disclosure dilemmas of individuals with hidden mental health conditions who have privately accepted their mental health condition (anxiety and/or depression), but have chosen not to disclose it in their respective workplaces.

Interviews were conducted with 15 individuals who experience anxiety and/or depression. These individuals work across diverse organizations and sectors in India (e.g. architecture and health care). Data were analyzed using qualitative methods.

Interviewees grappled with three dilemmas: professionalism versus authenticity (i.e. bringing only a partial professional self or the whole self to work), withdrawal versus participation (i.e. withdrawal from workplace interactions to conceal their condition or participation such that people could know of it) and personal privacy versus general advocacy (i.e. guarding one's privacy or engaging in advocacy for individuals who experience mental health conditions). Overall, findings suggest that the disclosure dilemma can stem from both one's internalized sense of a devalued self and by perceived contextual cues.

Findings imply that perceived contextual conditions that amplify threat of discovery and its anticipated consequences can lead to and reinforce the disclosure dilemma. As individuals internalize others' constructions of themselves, they self-police and do not interrogate assumed normality within their social contexts.

Employers can create inclusive environments. Present findings suggest some examples of inclusive practices such as the employment of dedicated resident counselors or counselors shared across organizations, training of stakeholders (including human resource personnel), allowing for selective disclosure (e.g. only to medical personnel) and cultivating informal support networks comprising similar others.

Such evidence-based research that can inform practices of inclusion for persons with a disability is especially important, considering that research on mental health conditions is conspicuous by its relative absence in mainstream management journals.

The provision of accommodation devices is said to aid organizational inclusion of employees with a disability. However, devices that are meant to enable might only partially facilitate productivity, independence, and social inclusion if these devices are not accepted by the user's workgroup. The authors outline a conceptual model of accommodation device acceptance through a sociomaterial lens to suggest conditions influencing workgroup device acceptance.

To build the model, the authors draw upon the sociomateriality and disability literature to frame accommodation devices as experienced in ongoing interactions, representing the goals, feelings, and interpretations of specific workgroups. The authors also unpack attributes of devices—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism—and propose how each of these can pattern social conduct to influence device acceptance. The authors then draw upon the disability literature to identify attributes of workgroups that can be expected to amplify or diminish the effect of device attributes on device acceptance in that workgroup.

The conceptualization, which the authors illustrate with examples particular to visual impairment, presents implications for who and what serves as a gatekeeper to accommodation device acceptance and thereby workgroup inclusion.

Prior research has focused on conditions under which devices are requested by users or made available by organizations, undergirded by the assumption that devices are well-specified once provided and that they operate relatively predictably when used in various workgroups. The authors focus instead on what happens after the device is provided and highlight the complex and dynamic interaction between an accommodation device and the workgroup, which influences device and user acceptance.

By extending the service robot acceptance model (sRAM), this study aims to explore and enhance the acceptance of chatbots. The study considered functional, relational, social, user and gratification elements in determining the acceptance of chatbots.

By using the purposive sampling technique, data of 321 service customers, gathered from millennials through a questionnaire and subsequent PLS-SEM modeling, was applied for hypotheses testing.

Findings revealed that the functional elements, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use affect acceptance of chatbots. However, in social elements, only perceived social interactivity affects the acceptance of chatbots. Moreover, both user and gratification elements (hedonic motivation and symbolic motivation) significantly influence the acceptance of chatbots. Lastly, trust is the only contributing factor for the acceptance of chatbots in the relational elements.

The study extends the literature related to chatbots and offers several guidelines to the service industry to effectively employ chatbots.

This is one of the first studies that used newly developed sRAM in determining chatbot acceptance. Moreover, the study extended the sRAM by adding user and gratification elements and privacy concerns as originally sRAM model was limited to functional, relational and social elements.

This paper aims to the integration of smart cities and technologies has had a profound impact on public library services globally. However, debates continue about how public libraries are incorporating smart technologies and tools, and what this means for their role in smart city development. This paper explores how public libraries are evolving to meet community needs by providing both physical and digital services.

The purpose of this study is to assess the role of public libraries in the smart cities and how they are aligning toward development of smart concepts, technologies, services such as contributions to smart city objectives, community impact, the digital divide, unique projects and readiness for future smart city advancements. So, the authors explored 11 public library systems of cities across the world implementing smart city projects.

The authors found that all the library systems offer extensive print and digital collections, sustainable buildings and a well-connected network of branches. They provide self-checkout services, makerspaces equipped with 3D printing and coding workshops and advanced recording and video editing technologies. Furthermore, these libraries function as community centers, serving diverse groups including children, women, the elderly and marginalized communities. They function as third spaces that foster lifelong learning and digital literacy.

Although smart cities face substantial debate regarding their features, tools and feasibility, public libraries have adapted and redefined their roles to become influential public institutions. They now play a crucial part in supporting vibrant and dynamic communities and neighborhoods within smart cities.

Persons with disabilities (PWD) are among the largest and most diverse minority groups and among the most disadvantaged in terms of employment. Entrepreneurial pursuit is often advocated as a path toward employment, inclusion, and equality, yet few studies have investigated earning variation among PWD.

The authors draw on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), and the disability employment and entrepreneurship literature to develop hypotheses about who among PWD are likely to earn more (less) from entrepreneurial pursuits. The authors then conduct analyses on the nationally representative sample of the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) by including all PWD engaged in entrepreneurial pursuit, and matching each to an organizationally employed counterpart of the same gender and race and of similar age and disability severity (n ≈ 810).

Entrepreneurial pursuit has a stronger negative association with the earnings of PWD who experience earlier disability onset ages, those who report more unmet accommodation needs, and those who are female.

First, this study applies SCCT to help bridge the literature on organizational employment barriers for PWD and entrepreneurs with disabilities. Second, we call into question the logic of neoliberalism about entrepreneurship by showing that barriers to organizational employment impact entrepreneurial pursuit decisions and thereby earnings. Third, we extend the understanding of entrepreneurial earnings among PWD by examining understudied disability attributes and demographic attributes. Lastly, this study is among the first to use a matched sample to empirically test the impact of entrepreneurial pursuit on the earnings of PWD.

The reported study aims at connecting the two crucial aspects of manufacturing of future, i.e. advanced analytics and digital simulation, with an objective to facilitate real-time control of manufacturing operations. The work puts forward a framework for designing prescriptive decision support system for a multi-machine manufacturing environment.

The schema of the decision support system design begins with the development of a simulation model for a manufacturing shop floor. The developed model facilitates prediction followed by prescription. As a connecting link between prediction and prescription mechanism, heuristics for intervention have been proposed. Sequential design and simulation-based demonstration of activities that span from development of a multi-machine shop floor model; a prediction mechanism and a scheme of intervention that ultimately leads to prescription generation are the highlights of the current work.

The study reveals that the effect of intervention on the observed predictors varies from one another. For a machine under observation, subject to same intervention scheme, while two of the predictive measures namely penalty and desirability stabilize after a certain point, a third measure, i.e. complexity, shows either an increase or decrease in percent change. The work objectively establishes that intervention plans have to be evaluated for every machine as well as for every environmental variable and emphasizes the need for dynamic evaluation and control mechanism.

The proposed prescriptive control mechanism has been demonstrated through a case of a high pressure die casting (HPDC) manufacturer.

Despite increased attention towards workplace disability in global and local development agenda, mainstream inclusion of persons with disability continues to be a challenge for most organizations. This paper aims to explore how organizations can be facilitated for adapting to the need and responsibility for change, towards evolving into disability inclusive workplaces.

This paper uses an inter-domain approach by linking organization change and development models to Indian indigenous disability management literature.

This review indicates that in comparison with the other dimensions of diversity, disability brings unique challenges that need a differentiated management approach. Further, it finds a strong base for organizations to approach disability management as a strategic and transformative change initiative, aligning with some of the proven change and organization development (OD) interventions.

This paper draws implications for disability management and highlights the need for a practice perspective towards disability management and OD.

This paper provides an integrated view of critical factors influencing workplace disability management and OD.