Attitudes towards People with Disabilities
With a more open and diverse marketplace, employee attitudes and requirements to the workplace environment vary significantly. When it comes to integration of a new employee with his personal background and value system into an already existent organization, a critical role is attributed to the organizational culture and the degree of openness of organization to accept a new employee. Organizational culture is shaped by members through both meanings of their actions and interpersonal work relationships. Organizational culture is the determinant of employee's feelings, attitudes, espoused values, and overt behaviors. As such, a corporate culture that satisfies employee's needs for safety at the same time encourages positive and healthy behavior of its' members.
Organizations differ in the way they view dissimilarity among its employees. Organizational stories, symbols, practices reveal to employees how an actual dissimilarity will be viewed. Traditionally, diverse people were expected to assimilate to an already existent dominant culture. As such, organizations that expect assimilation cannot be considered open to the changes and diversity. In contrast, organizations that explicitly express their will to value the diversity are more successful and reach greater employee productivity through a higher rate of work satisfaction.
A healthy organizational environment that encourages diversity among its' member and provides safety and satisfaction of employee's needs is crucial to company's success. Consideration for the general psychological needs of employees, even though obvious, still is not applied in every organization. As such, analysis of attitudes of employees could be applied within an organization to enhance and develop a more productive and tolerant corporate culture.
Even though it is difficult to objectively estimate the level of discrimination that is based on biased perceptions of an individual with disability, the issue is omnipresent in companies. As much as 43 million of individuals are covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Even though African Americans and other racial minorities have made significant gains in their movement towards equality in employment opportunities, a significant percentage of disabled population remains unemployed. According to statistical data, as much as 66% of unemployed individual sighted other reason then personal capabilities as the major determinants of the hiring process. One of the dominant reasons is biased behavior and poor attitudes to people with disabilities.
An estimate of 43 million of people with disabilities is not a homogeneous group and perceptions of them vary. A perception of an individual with a learning disability is very much likely to be different as compared with the perception of a person with alcoholism or epilepsy. When analyzing work attitudes, the underlying factors like the type of disability matters when it comes to perception of a person. In case if a job applicant is personally responsible for own disability, he or she is likely to receive a lower evaluation from a manager. As the current research suggests, attitudes towards people with disabilities are even though multidimensional, but almost in all cases remain to be biased. Perceptions of individuals are dependent on overtness, risk and response associated with disability.
One of the most direct implications of this knowledge is adjustment of the counseling process. As such, a counselor should carefully consider the level of risk factors associated with the degree of overtness and the responsiveness of an individual. These factors, being the determinants of human bias, should be carefully considered and an individual with disabilities should be prepared to questions about own disability. Another possible implication is the organizations culture itself in a company that employs individuals with disabilities. An employer should think twice before implementing a one for all disabled strategy, as not only personality factors should be considered, but also the nature of disability itself.
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