The Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Chicago was a major academic event, with five days of presentations held in five different hotels. This year, I was particularly pleased to see a significant focus on neurodiversity inclusion in many of these presentations.
It was an honor to serve as a discussant at the symposium titled “Innovating for the Future Workforce: Neurodiversity Inclusive Selection, Retention, and Performance.” The symposium brought together some of the most innovative research in the field, highlighting both the progress we’ve made and the challenges that remain in creating management and human resources systems that genuinely support neuroinclusion.
One of the key takeaways from the symposium, as highlighted by my fellow discussant Tim Vogus, is that the field is maturing. We are now seeing meaningful research that explores the multiple levels of factors impacting inclusion, from organizational structures to individual experiences. However, despite this progress, there is still much work to be done.
A particularly striking finding came from the organizational-level research conducted by Michał Tomczak and his colleagues. Their work revealed that fewer than 2% of organizations are both willing and able to provide quality neuroinclusive employment. This lack of inclusive opportunities leaves many neurodivergent individuals facing significant challenges in both access to jobs and success in jobs.
Access barriers include bias in interviews—an issue explored in depth by Debra Comer and her team, who focused on better understanding the mechanisms of biases that result in neurotypical raters assigning lower scores to autistic interviewees. While better understanding of these mechanisms is relevant to many organizational processes, such as performance evaluation, I suggest a more radical solution to the interview problem. Given the extent of subjectivity and bias in interviews, perhaps it’s time to redesign hiring with an emphasis on more valid and less biased skill assessments and job samples.
In addition to biases in hiring practices, neurodivergent employees often find themselves dealing with success barriers and seeking safety in ableist workplaces.
Success barriers include a range of issues, from the office design that ignores the need for privacy and concentration to interpersonal mistreatment. The research by Frederike Scholz and her colleagues sheds light on this critical issue, revealing the lengths to which individuals must go to navigate environments that are not designed with their needs in mind.
Moreover, many neurodivergent employees are forced to engage in job crafting—modifying their roles to better suit their strengths and needs—because the roles themselves were not designed with inclusion in mind. The research by Jennifer Spoor and her colleagues provides valuable insights into the ways in which neurodivergent individuals adapt to less-than-ideal work environments.
The “business case” for neurodiversity often touts “neurodivergent superpowers” and exceptional talents. Such simplified accounts fail to reflect the duality of neurodivergent experience at work, where talents and strengths of neurodivergent people, such as the strong sense of justice and intense interests, can contribute to productivity but also to stress. I am grateful for the research of Michelle Checketts, whose qualitative, in-depth exploration of the lived experiences of neurodivergent individuals in the workplace offers critical insights into the complexity of their experiences.
