Most guidance for managers and organizational leaders on disability at work focuses on getting people into jobs, particularly at the entry-level. While this is an important start, it leaves unaddressed the career advancement goals and aspirations of many persons with disabilities. In this article, we share contemporary research on the career advancement barriers that persons with disabilities encounter, called “glass barriers”.We then introduce a model that managers and organizational leaders can apply in their work to make career advancement more disability inclusive. This model, called the “three-legged stool”, includes 1) strategies that employees with disabilities can engage in to manage their own career advancement, 2) information on how managers and others at work can support the career development of employees with disabilities, and 3) how organizational programs, senior leader practices, and policy can be designed to make career advancement more disability inclusive. We conclude with 22 recommendations on how to support the career advancement of employees with disabilities, along with various evidence-based tools and resources that can help make this work possible.
Scrutiny peaks — inspections, investigations, incidents — often trigger a familiar response: leaders tighten control. In expert organizations, that response can backfire. As teams optimize for what is defensible rather than what is right, voice narrows, escalation slows, and judgment weakens when it is needed most. Drawing on a two-year qualitative field study of 19 senior partners in major audit firms operating under external inspection in France, this article identifies a recurrent mechanism we call defensive compliance drift. It develops four leadership shifts that help interrupt this drift: carry the position, not just the expertise; build influence before formal authority runs out; demand reconstructable reasoning, not just visible compliance; and make red lines explicit while protecting voice. We translate these shifts into a practical playbook for inspection preparation, risk reviews, and escalation conversations. These dynamics are relevant well beyond France in expert settings marked by external review, visible accountability, and judgment under uncertainty. The four-shift framework provides a practical starting point for such settings, while requiring further validation and adaptation across sectors and jurisdictions.
Organizations are investing in sustainability through digital transformation, automation, workspace redesign, paperless systems, AI-enabled operations, and efficiency initiatives, yet many such efforts quietly underperform. Hidden accessibility barriers can weaken adoption, increase support burden, trigger redesign costs, and undermine trust. This article introduces the ACCESS Framework, which helps leaders Assess hidden exclusion risks, Consult affected stakeholders, Create inclusive design standards, Evaluate real user experience, Safeguard critical trade-offs, and Sustain continuous adaptation. The framework distinguishes six forms of access: physical, digital, cognitive, sensory, linguistic, and procedural. It also provides a trade-off matrix and a worked example showing how ACCESS can guide a paperless HR platform from initial assessment through post-launch adaptation. ACCESS helps leaders build sustainability initiatives that are more inclusive, credible, and durable.
In workplaces shaped by time pressure, hybrid arrangements, and reduced informal interaction, organizations need ways to strengthen relational capacity. We develop the Commensality Model, a five-stage diagnostic and design framework that treats shared meals as a contingent intervention whose value depends on team context, implementation choices, and ongoing monitoring. The model specifies when commensality is likely to reinforce trust, psychological safety, inclusion, and coordination, and when it may backfire by amplifying conflict, hierarchy, or forced participation. We further argue that repeated team-level relational gains can accumulate into organization-level benefits through denser informal networks, stronger cross-unit coordination, and a climate of everyday connection. Finally, we extend the framework to hybrid and remote settings by examining digital commensality and non-food substitutes that preserve key mechanisms when shared meals are infeasible. The article positions commensality as a practical tool for organizational flourishing.
Although most individuals with opioid use disorder are employed, many organizations lack effective strategies for addressing opioid-related challenges. The presence, complexity, and implications of opioids and opioid use in the workplace necessitate a deeper understanding of the topic. In this paper, we review pathways to opioid use disorder, including work-related risk factors, and outline its individual and organizational consequences. We contrast punitive approaches with supportive approaches to managing opioid-related workplace challenges. We present practical, evidence-based recommendations to help managers prevent opioid-related harm and support employee recovery. These recommendations include both a preventative focus (what managers can do to minimize the likelihood of employee opioid use) and a reactive focus (how managers can manage the consequences of opioid use disorder).
Organizations striving to meet sustainability goals often rely on behavioral nudges – defaults, incentives, and reminders – to influence employee behavior. While effective in the short term, these approaches can generate unintended consequences, including dependency, disengagement, and limited long-term impact. This article presents a practitioner-oriented framework for combining nudging with cognitive boosting to support more durable forms of workplace sustainability. Advances in AI-enabled workplace systems allow these approaches to be implemented through personalized, context-sensitive interventions at scale. A decision framework is provided for when to use nudges, boosts, or both, and is complemented by design principles and implementation constraints for AI-enabled systems, providing actionable guidance for managers.
This paper explores how autism influences psychological safety and employees’ relationships with their leaders and autistic leaders’ relationships with their followers. We summarize current research on autism and employment, including evidence for persistent unemployment and underemployment, the social challenges largely responsible for these outcomes, and the recent interest among employers in autistic talent. Our analysis centers on autistic psychological safety as critical to leader-follower relationships and demonstrates how its absence undermines inclusion and development of both autistic employees and autistic leaders. We identify four barriers to autistic psychological safety: stigma, neurotypical norms and expectations, cross-neurotype interactions and miscommunication, and low-quality leader-follower relationships. Our analysis highlights how the double empathy problem, a concept that explains the frequent misunderstandings and negative attributions in interactions between autistic and neurotypical people, contributes to the persistence of these barriers. For each barrier, we offer targeted remedies – including authentic leadership, outcomes-based leadership and clear communication – that aim to increase autistic psychological safety and improve leader-follower relationships.
Businesses in declining markets are often advised to pivot or transform to survive. However, legacy-driven businesses operate under a different logic, where commitment to tradition shapes both strategic choices and organisational identity. In this article, we draw on case analysis of Japanese sake breweries to examine how such firms respond to sustained market decline. Rather than interpreting resistance to change as inertia, we show how cultural embeddedness and legacy orientation structure strategic decision-making. We develop a decision-oriented framework that identifies four strategic pathways, namely, legacy preservation, legacy progression, legacy stewardship, and legacy ambidexterity. Each pathway reflects a distinct way of leveraging legacy under conditions of market decline and entails specific organisational conditions and trade-offs. Our model offers a structured approach to sustaining tradition as a key strategy in industries where cultural and historical significance define success.
Job customization can be used as a tool by employers to create an inclusive workplace, in particular for people with disabilities. To be successful, customized jobs must address the business needs of the organization in addition to aligning with the capabilities, interests, and needs of the person with disabilities. In this article we focus on the employer perspective to explain the key role played by intermediaries, such as employment specialists and job coaches, in negotiating customized jobs for people with disabilities. Considering their expertise and training, intermediaries are uniquely positioned to support employers in achieving their strategic goals for inclusive hiring and refining their work design practices to ensure optimal person-job fit. However, we recognize that the success of a customized job negotiation remains conditional on the actions of the employer. Specifically, we identify seven actionable recommendations for employers to implement before negotiating, during negotiations, and after negotiating a customized job. When this list of “dos and don’ts” is followed, these guidelines allow employers to foster inclusive and productive workplaces and enhance employment outcomes for people with disabilities.
Requesting and granting accommodation for people with disabilities occurs in both hiring settings and on the job with aims of legal compliance and promoting inclusion. How accommodation processes are implemented can signal the organization has a genuine commitment to allyship for people with disabilities or can signal performative allyship. In this essay, the ways in which gaps in implementation of processes for accommodation can signal minimalist versus genuine commitment to increasing accessibility and supporting workers with disabilities are outlined. Suggestions for improving implementation, addressing benign neglect, and interrogating performativity in accommodation procedures are discussed.
As organizations accelerate transformation, a paradox is emerging: the individuals tasked with driving change are quietly burning out. Change champions absorb resistance, manage emotional fallout, and sustain momentum often, without formal authority or structured support. Traditional change management focuses on process, communication, and milestones; however, it often neglects the emotional labor embedded in transformation work. The CARES framework: Containment Infrastructure, Acknowledgment of Emotional Labor, Role Distribution, Emotional Recovery Cycles, and Sensemaking with Identity Sensitivity offers a practical approach for designing emotionally sustainable change systems. Drawing on real-world change dilemmas, the framework illustrates how leaders can prevent compassion fatigue among high-commitment employees and build transformation architectures that protect energy rather than just timelines. Instead of asking champions to be more resilient, CARES reframes burnout as a design failure and offers leaders a blueprint for sustaining both people and performance during continuous change.
Organisations introducing generative AI rarely design how they will delegate to it; they discover the pattern after the fact. Convenience choices accumulate, spread by observing leaders, and harden through tipping-point dynamics into implicit norms about which reasoning tasks humans retain or cede. By the time governance frameworks appear, a default norm already dominates. Drawing on research in social norms, cognitive automation, and AI-mediated decision-making, this article explains how AI delegation norms emerge, stabilise, and resist revision. It identifies the pre-design phase as the lowest-cost moment for managerial intervention and shows why three common frames – productivity, capability attrition, and agency – each target the wrong unit of analysis to shape a norm. It proposes three governance practices and a brief Delegation Audit to support proactive norm design.
How can managers and HR professionals best design jobs for neurodivergent employees? Drawing on research in job design, we translate key insights into practical strategies for creating more inclusive roles. Job design shapes the work employees do—including task responsibilities, physical work environments, and relational dynamics. We outline actionable recommendations across these three dimensions and highlight the tensions managers may face when balancing the needs of neurodivergent and neurotypical employees. In particular, we focus on two critical considerations: standardized versus individualized job design, and self-crafted versus other-crafted job design. By thoughtfully navigating these dimensions, organizations can improve performance and well-being for neurodivergent employees while building more inclusive workplaces for everyone.
Strategy implementation often diverges from planned intent. Middle managers—who translate strategy into action—are often at the center of this gap. Prior work has often treated such deviations as a problem of weak alignment or resistance. Here, we examine, however, when and why middle-manager deviations become constructive adaptations compared with destructive drift. In so doing, we draw on 92 documented deviations reported by 40 middle managers across 30 multinational organizations. The goal is to distinguish between deviations that improve outcomes and those that delay, dilute, or derail execution. Our analysis identifies seven recurring reasons for deviation, each of which is rooted in organizational design rather than individual indiscipline. Disagreement with strategy was nearly universal across both constructive and destructive deviations. As such, it does not explain implementation failure. Instead, misaligned incentives, lack of accountability, and insufficient slack systematically distinguish destructive from constructive outcomes. We also integrate these findings into a design-based framework that explains how organizational conditions shape middle managers’ sensemaking, prioritization, and use of discretion during implementation. Specifically, our study reframes deviation as a diagnostic signal. It also offers actionable guidance for leaders seeking to reduce destructive drift while enabling constructive adaptation. These findings suggest that leaders should shift attention from enforcing compliance to designing implementation contexts that channel middle managers’ discretion toward constructive adaptation rather than destructive drift.
Nearly half of the global population will experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives, yet many employees continue to struggle in silence at work because of persistent stigma and limited managerial preparedness. This silence carries real costs: employees who fear negative reactions may hide symptoms, avoid seeking support, and disengage, while managers often feel unsure how to interpret behavior changes or how to respond without overstepping. We argue that organizations must move beyond treating mental health and illness as an exceptional problem and instead recognize it as a normal, recurrent feature of working life. Drawing on existing research and qualitative data from managers, HR professionals, and employees with mental health conditions across multiple countries, we propose a three-step framework for developing “mental health confidence” in organizations. The framework emphasizes (1) enhancing mental health literacy so managers understand the varied, often invisible nature of mental health conditions and the legal context surrounding them; (2) normalizing mental health conditions by openly acknowledging both their challenges and potential strengths, supported by practices such as job crafting and peer support; and (3) building mental health efficacy, equipping managers and HR with practical skills, tools, and policies to respond effectively when employees are struggling. We conclude that investing in managers’ mental health confidence is both a matter of fairness and a strategic lever for retention, performance, and inclusion.
Innovation is widely celebrated as the holy grail of firm survival and success in the global economy. However, uncritical pursuit of innovation can lead to catastrophic failures, resource depletions, and reputational damages. This article argues that strategic restraint in innovation is not necessarily a sign of organizational sluggishness but a deliberate decision rooted in a systematic assessment of firm, market, and contextual factors. It advances a systematic yet pragmatic framework to identify scenarios where refraining from innovation is the suitable strategic choice. By analyzing customer demand, compatibility with organizational core, complementarity within ecosystems, counterpart dynamics, cost and benefit tradeoffs, and contextual fit, this 6 C framework provides actionable insights and practical guidance for management practitioners to balance innovation ambition with strategic prudence so as to preserve core values, optimize resource allocation, and mitigate corresponding risks. Ultimately, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of innovation strategy, emphasizing that the ability to "not innovate" when circumstances demand is as critical as the ability to innovate.
Teleworking is becoming a persistent feature of contemporary work arrangements, placing strain on the psychological contract between employees and employers. This paper examines how innovation helps managers to sustain employment relationships under prolonged geographical, temporal, and social isolation. Drawing on year-long case of an employee engaged in geographically extreme teleworking, we show that innovation operates not merely as adaptation but as a relational mechanism for preventing and repairing contract disruptions over time. We identify four psychological contract phases-burgeoning, intensification, conflict, and reshaping-each associated with distinct types of innovation. We show that contract strain often originates in employees' interaction with sustained structural separation rather than organizational failure. We translate these insights into manager-ready playbook to support sustainable geographically extreme teleworking arrangements.
Organizations today are under growing pressure to openly express their stance on values such as diversity and sustainability, while also managing the risks associated with such visibility. In practice, many organizations neither fully maintain nor abandon these commitments but instead adjust how they express them. This article examines this pattern, termed "quiet rewrite," defined as shifts in tone, visibility, and framing that alter how commitments are communicated without necessarily changing underlying actions. Based on structured comparisons of organizational disclosures across 2023 and 2025, we identify three recurring forms of adjustment and introduce a two-layer model distinguishing expression from implementation. This distinction explains how organizations appear both stable and changing, offering managers ways to diagnose evolving commitments and manage consistency-adaptation tensions effectively.
Organizations are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), yet many struggle to translate adoption into sustained value. The core challenge is often not technological capability but the AI solutionism trap: a managerial tendency to frame complex organizational problems as primarily solvable through algorithms and data. Drawing on research in managerial decision-making, socio-technical systems, and AI governance, this article explains how solutionism emerges in everyday practice, why it persists, and how it undermines performance, accountability, and trust. Many AI failures are shown to be predictable outcomes of managerial dynamics, including premature problem closure, escalation of commitment, and diffusion of responsibility as systems scale. To mitigate these risks, the paper introduces a practical managerial playbook centered on governance-in-use: concrete practices that slow adoption, reopen problem framing before deployment, make evaluation transparent, and legitimize decisions to pause, modify, or withdraw AI systems. The central implication is clear: sustainable value from AI depends less on speed of adoption than on disciplined judgment under uncertainty.
Organizations frequently tolerate communication delivered without regard for truth, evidence, or established knowledge in decision-making and accountability contexts—what philosophers and psychologists term bullshit. Unlike lies, which deliberately subvert truth, bullshit represents an indifference to accuracy, which experimental research suggests may make it both more prevalent and paradoxically more persuasive in domains where evidence-based reasoning is critical. Studies indicate that bullshit-framed arguments may outperform evidence-based reasoning in influencing attitudes, and produce stronger sleeper effects over time, with the potential to gradually degrade organizational decision-making quality. This article focuses specifically on bullshit’s harmful effects in decision-making, performance evaluation, and accountability reporting—contexts where factual accuracy is essential—while explicitly recognizing that strategic ambiguity, aspirational talk, and selective communication serve legitimate functions in vision-setting, coalition-building, and innovation contexts. The analysis synthesizes experimental findings from social psychology with organizational cases including Alan Mulally’s transformation of Ford Motor Company and the Madoff investment fraud to offer practitioners theoretically informed propositions for building more bullshit-resistant decision-making cultures. A managerial playbook offers theoretically derived implementation frameworks with explicit boundary conditions, including proposed reality-testing protocols and meeting reform guidelines. A decision framework helps practitioners distinguish contexts requiring evidence-based clarity from contexts where ambiguity legitimately serves. Drawing on scholarship in psychological safety, employee voice and silence, impression management, and organizational learning, the analysis explores why bullshit may flourish despite its harmful effects and identifies systemic organizational dynamics that warrant attention.
