Don’t Ask, I’ll Tell: Investigating Strategy Use During Disability Disclosure at Work

Abstract

The nature and effects of workplace disability disclosure—sharing disability-relevant information with others at work—is of great interest to researchers and human resources professionals. In this dissertation, I investigate the various strategies individuals with disabilities use while disclosing their disabilities in work-related contexts, and the effects of employing these strategies. In Study 1, I qualitatively gathered strategies used by individuals with disabilities and coded them using thematic analysis—towards developing a scale that measures the extent to which these behaviours are used. In Studies 2 and 3, I refine the items generated in Study 1 and confirm the factor structure of the resultant scale for assessing individuals’ use of strategies. In Study 4, I provide convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity for my scale. Finally, in Study 5, I experimentally demonstrate the effects of using disclosure strategies in a job search context. It is my hope that this work stimulates further research on this important topic. As such, I discuss multiple future directions and implications for my findings in this dissertation.