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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.

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.

Support at the organizational and managerial levels defines the degree to which construction workplaces can accommodate disabled and injured workers. There is little empirical evidence about the indicators and practices that can be used by construction organizations to evaluate disability management (DM). This paper aims to develop and validate key indicators and practices of disability/injury management within construction.

To achieve this, the research used a two-phase sequential exploratory review of literature, followed by a quantitative phase, using analytic hierarchy process. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) involved recruiting eight health and safety and DM experts to conduct pairwise comparisons of these indicators.

The results found return-to-work and disability and injury management practices to be the most important indicators and physical accessibility and claims management practices to be the least important.

The development of these indicators should help construction organizations develop DM programs that better meet their needs, and benchmark and improve related performance.

The results could also be useful for all stakeholders in general and decision makers in particular involved within construction.

Such prioritization helps organizations to prioritize their DM practices thereby optimizing performance.

Different organisations have developed policies and programmes to prevent workplace injuries and facilitate return to work. Few multiple workplace studies have examined workers’ perceptions of these policies and programmes. The purpose of this paper is to compare workers’ perception and experience of workplace policies and practices on injury prevention, people-oriented work culture, and return to work.

This study recruited 118 workers from three healthcare facilities through an online and paper survey.

Work-related musculoskeletal injury was experienced by 46 per cent of the workers, with low back injuries being most prevalent. There were significant differences in perception of policies and practices for injury prevention among occupational groups, and between workers who have had previous workplace injury experience and those without past injury.

Selection bias is possible because of voluntary participation. A larger sample could give stronger statistical power.

The perception of workplace policies can vary depending on workers’ occupational and injury status. Organisational managers need to pay attention to the diversity among workers when designing and implementing injury prevention and return to work policies.

Risks for workplace injuries are related to multiple factors, including workplace policies and practices on health and safety. Workers’ understanding and response to the policies, programmes, and practices can determine injury outcomes.

No previous study has reported on workers’ perceptions of workplace policies and practices for injury prevention and return in Manitoba healthcare sector.

Despite several concerted efforts and directives, Indian organizations have a long road to travel with respect to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the workforce. Disability taking different forms often impacts organizational decisions on employment and inclusion of persons with disabilities. Acknowledging the role of employers in improving their employment prospects, the purpose of this paper is to examine key factors that direct the decisions regarding targeted recruitment of persons with various types of disabilities.

The exploratory study is based on thematic analysis of senior executives' accounts to examine the factors that direct their decisions pertaining to employment of persons with varied types of disabilities.

Findings highlight organizational determinants that enable/disable employment of persons with varied types of disabilities. The organizational determinants reported are: knowledge about type of disability; work characteristics; accommodations based on type of disability; accessibility of physical infrastructure and external pressures; whereas, persons with orthopedic, vision, hearing and intellectual disabilities are represented in the employee base.

The present study contributes to employer perspectives on workplace disability inclusion toward understanding the nuances of organizational dynamics and human perceptions. Future studies could explore perspectives of other key stakeholders and the conditions under which organizational determinants are perceived as enabling or disabling.

The present study highlights how disability type influences leaders' views on recruitment of persons with disabilities, in an under-researched study context of Indian organizations.

Many employers lack disability confidence regarding how to include people with disabilities in the workforce, which can lead to stigma and discrimination. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of disability confidence from two perspectives, employers who hire people with a disability and employees with a disability.

A qualitative thematic analysis was conducted using 35 semi-structured interviews (18 employers who hire people with disabilities; 17 employees with a disability).

Themes included the following categories: disability discomfort (i.e. lack of experience, stigma and discrimination); reaching beyond comfort zone (i.e. disability awareness training, business case, shared lived experiences); broadened perspectives (i.e. challenging stigma and stereotypes, minimizing bias and focusing on abilities); and disability confidence (i.e. supportive and inclusive culture and leading and modeling social change). The results highlight that disability confidence among employers is critical for enhancing the social inclusion of people with disabilities.

The study addresses an important gap in the literature by developing a better understanding of the concept of disability from the perspectives of employers who hire people with disabilities and also employees with a disability.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) recognizes the right of disabled people to access work. Against this legislative backdrop, this study explores the strengths and weaknesses of the Italian system of targeted placement for disabled people, based on Law 68/1999, which delegates to regional authorities the management of the labor market. The examination centers on the perspective of companies, the primary stakeholders in the inclusion of persons with disabilities within organizational structures.

The article discusses the results of focus groups conducted with 28 managers of large, medium and small enterprises in Lombardy (Italy). Qualitative analysis was employed, and the results were structured using a simplified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis, incorporating practical recommendations.

The analysis leads to practical suggestions to improve the entire targeted placement process at the regional level, from selection and accompaniment to evaluation, such as improving the networking of local stakeholders who deal with the inclusion of disabled people, homogeneity of the procedures in different regions, making all employees aware of diversity management, etc. The territorial network and the welfare environment are particularly important in achieving a successful targeted placement and to promote an inclusive corporate culture.

This study is not representative of Italy as a whole, as it remains a qualitative investigation focused on a single region.

This contribution accomplishes an in-depth study of the law of labor inclusion of people with disabilities observed from the point of view of companies, which are still usually reluctant to integrate people with disabilities into their organizations or encounter difficulties in doing so.

A review of the literature revealed a lack of coherent frameworks for implementing disability management, particularly within the construction industry. This study involved developing the construction disability management maturity model (CDM3) to assess the maturity of disability management (DM) practices in construction organisations.

In its current form, the model assessed twelve indicators using a series of questions representing relevant best practices for each indicator and five different maturity levels. An analytical hierarchical process was conducted using eight construction and DM experts to determine the weights of importance of these different indicators. The model was then applied to evaluate ten construction companies in Manitoba, Canada.

The results revealed that the indicators of “Return to Work”, “Disability and Injury Prevention”, and “Senior Management Support” practises were the most heavily weighted and, thus, the most important. Companies' DM performance was observed, on average, to be at the quantitatively managed level. “Senior Management Support” and “Disability Injury Prevention” practices were observed to be the most mature indicators on average, revealing a potential relationship between the most important and most mature indicators.

The sample size of companies evaluated is a key limitation in that it does not permit for the generalisation of the results.

This study provided a framework for benchmarking the DM performance of construction organisations.

No similar maturity model has been developed to date to assess DM in construction, making the CDM3 the first of its kind to evaluate a construction organisation's existing DM practices against best practises.

A healthy and vital workforce is an asset to any organization. Workplace health management and health promotion are therefore increasingly relevant for organizations. This paper aims to identify the organizational benefits companies strive for, and analyzes the ways companies use and manage data in order to monitor, evaluate and improve the achievement of organizational benefits through workplace health management.

A case study was carried out in four frontrunner organizations in health management in The Netherlands. The benefits the companies strived for were systematically investigated, as were the ways in which the companies used and managed their relevant data.

The organizations had many data that were potentially useful for managing and evaluating the realization of the intended health and business benefits. However, these data were only available and usable in a fragmented manner. As a result, the business impact of health interventions was neither properly evaluated nor consistently managed.

The research was limited to four frontrunner companies in The Netherlands. The results presented are predominantly qualitative.

Suggestions for improving the management of organizational benefits from workplace health interventions are given here; they were formulated though an iterative process with the companies involved.

Research on the combination of health and business benefits of workplace health management has been rather limited thus far. The present paper provides a complete picture of the benefits strived for by four Dutch frontrunner organizations, as well as the data available to them, which are or could be used for guiding and improving workplace health management.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the injured worker’s perspective of experiences with their workplace return to work coordinator (RTWC), and explore some of the barriers they encountered in the return to work process.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten injured workers from New South Wales, Australia. The thematic analysis of transcripts was completed.

The findings provide an insight into the experiences of injured workers and their relationship with RTWCs. Five key themes emerged from the data: return to work experiences and the RTWC role, high turnover and lack of consistency in the role, RTWC “ideal”, knowledge and skills, communication skills and the RTWC role and GP visits privacy and conflict of interest with peer RTWCs.

The role of the workplace RTWC in the return to work process for injured workers is important and these findings are highly relevant to the return to work sector. Consistency within the role at the workplace and careful consideration of the specific traits and characteristics required by an individual to perform the role need to be observed during the selection process by employers when appointing a workplace RTWC to assist injured workers return to work.

This is the first Australian study to examine the injured workers views and experiences with the workplace RTWC and other factors that shape the return to work process.