A Commentary on Santuzzi et al. (2024): Managing Uncertainty for Disability Disclosure

Abstract

In their focused study on the effect of organizational language on workers’ behaviors related to disclosing a disability, Santuzzi and coauthors (2024) explore how employees with disabilities (EWD) weigh the decision to disclose their conditions to employers. We advance this work by offering a relevant theoretical perspective, Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT; Lind & Van den Bos, 2002) for considering EWD’s decisions to disclose. UMT holds that employees strongly look for cues of workplace procedural and interactional justice, in moments of uncertainty. We assert that disclosing one’s disability in moments like those studied by Santuzzi and colleagues (2024) pose high uncertainty for employees who look for signals of just treatment. We explore those processes as they relate to disability disclosure and introduce practical suggestions for organizations to reduce uncertainty surrounding disability disclosure.

The Uncertainty of Disclosure

Disclosing a disability in the workplace—regardless of type—poses the real threat of stigma, a mark difficult to remove or undo that carries an associated range of beliefs and attitudes (Follmer & Jones, 2018) detrimental to EWD’s success. In addition to experiencing ostracism and prejudices of inability (Toth & Dewa, 2014), disclosing one’s disability can lead to the loss of professional opportunities out of benevolent motivations by coworkers and managers who seek to shield or protect EWD from additional strain or difficulty (Hein & Ansari, 2022). (Lind & Van den Bos, 2002; Santuzzi et al., 2024).

The prospect of disclosure raises tremendous uncertainty for employees who must weigh the potential benefits of disclosure against the likely risks (Follmer et al., 2020; Santuzzi et al., 2024). Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT; Lind & Van den Bos, 2002) explains how employees face a nearly constant source of uncertainty from organizational authorities—managers, supervisors, administrators—who hold power over processes that affect employees. UMT explains the importance of organizational justice information and practices in helping employees to mitigate this uncertainty.

UMT, we believe, can partly explain Santuzzi et al. (2024) findings that using labels like ‘qualifying condition’ (cf. disability) serve to signal the organization’s justice of process and treatment surrounding EWD. Applying UMT to explain these findings can allow for broader exploration of the conceptual mechanism—increasing the signals of prospective justice to reduce the uncertainty associated with disability disclosures—using the robust body of existing justice research and recommendations (e.g., Adamovic, 2023; Colquitt, 2008).

Justice & Disclosure Decision Points

EWD face a range of moments that we term disclosure decision-points (Follmer et al., 2020), when they could disclose their disability to an organizational member. Among disclosure decision-points, one can consider (a). workers with existing disabilities who may disclose as part of a new job role or responsibility or (b). employees with an existing job role or responsibility who may disclose a recently diagnosed/onset disability. Also, employees may disclose either (a). informally (e.g., verbally, without a specific goal/purpose of disclosure) or (b). formally (e.g., as part of a process to access a benefit or to adhere with a policy; Chaudoir & Fisher, 2010). Take a job candidate with a disability, for example, who advances past initial application phase. They can disclose during interviews, as part of a new hire process to request accommodations, in initial visits with a manager/supervisor (a majority of employees are more likely to disclose their disability to their direct supervisory rather than to an HR member, Jain-Link & Kennedy, 2019), or even during their benefits election period. Even if they are not revealing their exact disability, employees can believe HR will infer a disability based on the employees’ voluntary benefit election (e.g., enrolling in employer-sponsored talk therapy could imply a mental health need; Follmer & Jones, 2021; Kalfa et al., 2021). Existing employees also face these potential disability decision-points (i.e., informal discussion with a manager, requesting accommodations/time-off/medical leave, benefit elections).

In line with guidance for signaling and observing justice in other management practice and policy, we assert companies can strategically reduce the uncertainty of these decision-points by leveraging organizational justice principles and research. UMT holds that uncertainty causes employees to attend to organizational justice as an informational cue, such that moments of higher uncertainty will increase sensitivity to topics of justice (Lind & Van den Bos, 2002). Companies and leaders, then, can provide justice signals to employees facing these disability disclosure-points to proactively alleviate uncertainty in the process. Below, we outline how organizations may practically signal procedural and interactional justice in disclosure decisions in order to reduce uncertainty.

Procedural Justice-Based Signaling

Primarily, the managers, leaders, and HR professionals in a company can strive to discuss policies surrounding disabilities as any other workplace topic, a normal reality involving existing processes and guidelines. For example, managers can proactively (cf. reactively) describe the company’s policies related to disabilities, especially related to the privacy of information, who in the company can access these personal details, and the minimal information employees must disclose to access benefits. Educating employees on standard organizational practices, where HR processes require only necessary information—and where processes only require disclosure to necessary parties—serves to reduce inaccurate or cynical beliefs that inspire employee uncertainty, particularly over perceptions of job performance and stigma (Gignac et al., 2021). Employees need better understanding of how disability information will be required, used, and accessed in their company, and managers need to make those processes transparent to signal their justice. Ideally, this can occur during employees’ initial time with the company (e.g., onboarding), during their benefits-enrollment period (where they may make changes to their benefits related to a disability), and informally during normal meetings (e.g., weekly check-ins). Companies may also rely on more structured organizational training methods for these purposes. Note, managers and HR professionals may need specific training to ensure they understand these policies accurately to explain to employees, and to observe the policies (e.g., privacy limitations) themselves.

Next, EWD tend to experience higher levels of procedural injustice (Snyder et al., 2010) than employees without a disability, so companies need to find more ways to increase the justice of processes for these employees specifically. For example, although a broad range of appeal, reporting, and other mechanisms exist for correcting decisions related to treatment of EWD, companies could rely more on methods of correctability that feature employee-led (e.g., employee resource groups or task forces; Welbourne et al., 2015) or crowd-sourced initiatives (e.g., employee listening data; Burris et al., 2024), especially when employees know that EWD compose these efforts. This representation, among the mechanisms of correctability, can serve to signal the process involves the voice of affected employees (cf. organizational authorities; Derbyshire et al., 2023).

Interactional Justice-Based Signals

Disclosure is often an extremely personal decision, based on trust and relationship strength (Follmer & Jones, 2021; Santuzzi et al., 2020). Thus, interactional justice may hold an outsized importance to reduce uncertainty surrounding disability disclosures. Beyond tenets of establishing interpersonal trust employees feel for their direct supervisors (e.g., providing support, meeting expectations, benevolence; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), managers can proactively signal interactional justice to employees through actions like appropriately recounting their own experiences with disability or sharing anonymized stories of EWD who were valuable team members (Bartram et al., 2018; Meachem et al., 2017). Providing personal experiences with disability can signal the manager’s comfort with the topic as a normal subject matter, rather than a taboo deficit (Kaye et al., 2011).

Often employees may reveal their disability informally, especially with direct supervisors, without a specific goal/purpose, or to pre-emptively explain a likely future absence (von Schrader et al., 2014). Managers, then, need to identify a priori their own rules (Lyons et al., 2018) for responses in these moments—aligned with company policies—and tell all their employees what to expect if they disclose, especially as it relates to the privacy of the information. Managers act as the representative agent of organizational policy regarding disability, so employees often heavily rely on them to understand how policies will affect them, or what their disclosure may result in (Schapp et al., 2023). Managers can provide an approachable route for employees considering disclosure. To facilitate this, managers must clearly communicate the honest realities of what to expect not only related to processes, but to how they will be treated in the conversation. Similarly, managers should determine and communicate guidelines for their work teams related to the privacy of disability information, given employees’ tendency to disclose to coworkers (Wotikcy et al., 2024). These local-level practices can reflect and contribute to the workplace’s broader climate of inclusion surrounding disability, disclosure, and under-represented groups (Li et al., 2019). Simply, managers can work in their own teams to foster a climate that fosters, rather than smothers, the confidence (cf. uncertainty) of justice for employees considering disclosure.

Conclusion

We introduce Uncertainty Management Theory as a mechanism to explore antecedents of disclosure decisions. In doing so, we expand on Santuzzi et al. (2024) focal article by focusing on organizational uncertainty that may drive disclosure decisions on employee forms. We assert that UMT offers a valuable explanation for how employees facing the uncertainty of revealing a disability alertly search for informational cues in the form of justice. Importantly, we believe companies must observe established best practices related to managing EWD, but also employ methods to proactively signal procedural and interactional justice to employees with disabilities who face disclosure decision-points, to better reduce uncertainty and maximize the benefits of available organizational support for these employees.