Engaging employees with disabilities in Vietnamese business context. The roles of disability inclusive HR practices and mediation and moderation mechanisms
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-06-2017-0134 |
| Date | 06 August 2018 |
| Pages | 822-847 |
| Published date | 06 August 2018 |
| Author | Tuan Trong Luu |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
Engaging employees with
disabilities in Vietnamese
business context
The roles of disability inclusive HR practices
and mediation and moderation mechanisms
Tuan Trong Luu
Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia
Abstract
Purpose –There has been a growing n umber, though still mod est, of organization s in Vietnam context
that hire employees wi th disabilities and buil d disability inclus ive management practic es and disability
diversity climate for t hem to engage in their work roles. The purpose of thi s paper is to investigate how
disability inclusive HR practices contribut e to work engagement of employees with di sabilities working in
Vietnam-based inform ation technology (IT) industry.
Design/methodology/approach –The research model was tested through the data collected from
employees with disabilities and their direct supervisors from IT companies based in Vietnam.
Findings –The data analysis revealed that disability inclusive HR practices influenced employees
with disabilities to engage in their work activities through organizational identification as a mediator.
Moral leadership exhibited a positive interactive effect with disability inclusive HR practices in promoting
organizational identification of employees with disabilities and, in turn, their work engagement. In addition,
employees’idiosyncratic deals were found to serve as an individual enhancer for the link between their
organizational identification and work engagement.
Originality/value –This research sets a milestone for more empirical inquiries on disability-oriented
antecedents at both organizational and individual levels that can foster work engagement of employees
with disabilities.
Keywords Vietnam, Organizational identification, Work engagement, Idiosyncratic deals (i-deals),
Moral leadership, Disability inclusive HR practices
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
A disability is defined as a significant impairment within an individual that limits his or her
ability to perform major life activities (such as working, managing a home, or personal care)
on account of a physical, mental or intellectual health problem (Olkin et al., 2006). As a result,
there are three groups of disabilities: physical disability, people with mental health problems
and intellectual disability (Cavanagh et al., 2017). Roughly 15 percent, or more than a billion
people in the world, have some forms of disabilities (WHO, 2011). Post-war sequelae
(e.g. lasting effects of Agent Orange; Demos, 2013), congenital diseases, ineffective
management of some infectious diseases (e.g. polio), accidents, and social factors have given
rise to high disability rate in Vietnam (Nguyen, 2012). Vietnam had approximately
15 million people with disabilities at the disability rate of 13.35 percent of the population
(Nguyen, 2012). Yet, just recently has disability hiring received employer attention due to
the emergence of Vietnamese Disabilities Law 2010 and customers’favorable perceptions
toward firms with social responsibility toward employees with disabilities (Nhung and
Anh, 2013; Luu, 2014). People with disabilities still have on average lower levels of job
security, employment and income than people without disabilities (Konrad et al., 2013;
Wubulihasimu et al., 2015). Notwithstanding negative attitudes toward and negative
self-perception by people with disabilities (Hashim and Wok, 2014), several employees with
disabilities manage to overcome these and adapt themselves to the working environment,
Employee Relations
Vol. 40 No. 5, 2018
pp. 822-847
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-06-2017-0134
Received 17 June 2017
Revised 7 November 2017
25 December 2017
4 February 2018
Accepted 5 February 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
822
ER
40,5
feel confident, and display as high job performance as individuals without disabilities
(Nhung and Anh, 2013). Thus, employees with disabilities are a “largely untapped human
resource”for organizations (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2008, p. 256).
Research models that investigate organizational drivers for employees with disabilities
to feel psychologically safe and fair, and engage in their work roles are responding to a
growing research trend on motivation and behaviors of employees with disabilities
(e.g. Erickson et al., 2014; Kalargyrou, 2014; Schur et al., 2016). Whereas Fujimoto et al.
(2014) argued that HR policies and practices have not advanced the inclusion of workers
with disabilities in the workplace, Meacham et al. (2017) empirically found that human
resource management (HRM) practices can support the social inclusion of employees with
disabilities through cultivating a social climate. Albeit HRM practices can positively
impact on the well-being and performance of employees with disabilities through the
creation of supportive workplace environments (Cavanagh et al., 2017; Yang and Konrad,
2011), little is known about the effects of HR practices on work engagement of employees
with disabilities. Work engagement is defined as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of
mind (Schaufeli et al., 2002).
Recent inquiries on employees with disabilities have commenced to look at their
affective-motivational state or work engagement and their organizational antecedents.
Studies have indicated that supportive management practices are effective rehabilitation
methods for employees with disabilities, which may foster their affective commitment to the
job (Baumgärtner et al., 2014). Research on the link between HRM and work-related
outcomes of employees with disabilities has also paid attention to their motivation to
participate in the work roles (Meacham et al., 2017). Hashim and Wok (2014) investigated the
effects of organizational factors on work involvement of employees with disabilities in
Malaysia. Small (2014) conducted a qualitative investigation into contextual factors for work
engagement of employees with disabilities. Due to the strong relationship between work
engagement and performance that Halbesleben et al. (2013) found on three samples of
working adults with intellectual disabilities, research on the effects of organizational factors,
especially HRM, on work engagement of employees with disabilities will impart more
insights into the disability management literature. Our research seeks to fill this gap by
investigating the role of disability inclusive HR practices as an organizational driver for
work engagement of employees with disabilities through mediation and moderation
mechanisms. Baumgärtner et al. (2014) reported the role of interpersonal and intrapersonal
resources to predict the job performance of people with disabilities. Therefore, our research
draws upon the job demands-resources ( JD-R) model of work engagement (Bakker and
Demerouti, 2007; Bakker and Leiter, 2010) to explain the role of disability inclusive HR
practices that provide such resources for employees with disabilities in promoting their
work engagement. Furthermore, the stig ma attached to disability and negative
self-perception of people with disabilities may present a barrier to their work engagement
(Hashim and Wok, 2014; Hemphill and Kulik, 2016). Disability inclusive HR practices
can help remove this stigma by modifying their self-identity, which is the part of their
self-concept of their attachment to the organization (Tajfel, 1974), and enhance their
self-esteem (Chen et al., 2015). On the contrary, discrimination in the workplace may detach
employees with disabilities from the workplace and lead to disengagement (Pass, 2018).
Disability inclusive HR practices that are designed to provide unprejudiced treatment to and
invest in the development of employees with disabilities (Boehm and Dwertmann, 2015;
Pérez-Conesa et al., 2017) may infuse into employees with disabilities the perception that
the organization is fair and caring to them, which may lead to their engagement in
the work roles. As discussed earlier, since disability inclusive HR practices can modify the
self-identity of employees with disabilities to make them identify with the organization and
engage in the work, their organizational identification can serve as a mediator for the
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Employees
with
disabilities
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