The Role of Inclusive Leadership: In Reducing Disability Accommodation Request Withholding

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