Measuring the impact of an organizational inclusion programme on absence among employees with disabilities: A quasi‐experimental design

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12124
• Author: Conxita FOLGUERA‐I‐BELLMUNT,Joan Manuel BATISTA‐FOGUET,Xavier FERNÁNDEZ‐I‐MARÍN
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018

International Labour Review, Vol. 157 (2018), No. 4

Copyright © The authors 2018

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2018

*

Senior Associate Lecturer in the Department of People Management and Organisation, and

Researcher at the Leadership Development Research Centre (GLEAD), ESADE Business School,

Ramon Llull University, Sant Cugat (Barcelona), email: conxita.folguera@esade.edu. ** Lec-

turer at LMU Munich, email: xavier.fernandez-i-marin@gsi.uni-muenchen.de. *** Director

of GLEAD, ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University, Sant Cugat (Barcelona), email:

joanm.batista@esade.edu.

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and

publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

[Correction added on 6 November 2020, after initial online publication. A duplicate of

this article was published under the DOI 10.1111/ilr.12071, this duplicate has now been deleted

and its DOI redirected to this version of the article.]

Measuring the impact of an organizational

inclusion programme on absence

among employees with disabilities:

A quasi-experimental design

Conxita FOLGUERA-I-BELLMUNT,* Xavier FERNÁNDEZ-I-MARÍN**

and Joan Manuel BATISTA-FOGUET***

Abstract. This article presents research on an organizational inclusion programme

aiming to reduce absenteeism due to illness and injury among employees with dis-

abilities. Qualitative eldwork on the programme’s characteristics was followed

by a quasi-experimental design with two control groups (non-equivalent and

no-treatment) using abbreviated time series (2005 –12). The data of employees

with disabilities who participated in the programme were compared with those

of non-participants and of employees without disabilities, through a hierarchical

non-nested negative binomial regression with a lagged outcome variable. The

authors nd strong evidence of a reduction in absence due to illness among

participant employees with disabilities, and somewhat weaker evidence of reduced

absence due to injury.

In recent decades, disability accommodation and inclusion in the workplace

have been encouraged by legislation and policy-makers (Baumgärtner et

al., 2015; Colella and Varma, 2001; Florey and Harrison, 20 00; Jones, 200 8;

Kulkarni and Lengnick-Hall, 2011; Kulkarni and Rodrigues, 2014; Schur et

al., 2014). However, companies and managers who could potentially employ

people with disabilities continue to be concerned by the presumption that

they will be absent from work more often than employees without disabilities

(Baldridge and Veiga, 2001; García-Serrano and Malo, 2014; Stone and Colella,

1996). While mainstream research on absenteeism has scarcely addressed

International Labour Review652

disability (Baker-McClearn et al., 2010; Della Torre, Pelagatti and Solari, 2015;

Johns, 2008; Patton and Johns, 2012), research investigating 1995 –2001 panel

data on absence among employees with disabilities in six European countries

concluded that they are absent more often than employees without disabilities

(García-Serrano and Malo, 2 014). There is, however, no research on the poten-

tial of organizational inclusion programmes to change the absence behaviour

of employees with disabilities. In seeking to help bridge this gap, this article

investigates the impact on absence behaviour of one such programme. Finding

evidence that organizational inclusion policies can reduce absenteeism among

employees with disabilities would be important in encouraging managers to

engage with inclusive policies. This is a matter of relevance, since disabilities

affect 15 per cent of the world population (WHO, 2011), and employment

rates for people with disabilities across the world range from one third to one

half of the rates for people without disabilities (Eurostat, 2016; WHO, 2011).

Absence from work among employees with disabilities has been ana-

lysed at the macro level (García-Serrano and Malo, 2014), but not within an

organizational context, as we propose to do in this study. While research ana-

lysing disability (Baumgärtner et al., 2015; Boehm and Dwertmann, 2015;

Colella and Varma, 2001; Florey and Harrison, 2000; Kulkarni and Gopaku-

mar, 2014; Kulkarni and Lengnick-Hall, 2011; Schur et al., 20 09; Schur et al.,

2014) includes a variety of organizational variables, to our knowledge it has

not examined absence and the reasons for absence.

Our research addresses precisely this gap. It seeks to answer the research

question: can an inclusion programme reduce absence from work among em-

ployees with disabilities? In this regard, we rst analysed the nature and main

features of a specic inclusion programme designed for employees with dis-

abilities. We then evaluated data on absence due to illness and absence due

to work injuries for employees with and without disabilities before and after

participating in the programme, and for employees with disabilities who did

not participate. We selected an organizational inclusion programme conducted

by a company that provides gardening services in parks in the metropolitan

area of Barcelona. We collected qualitative data on the programme, and quan-

titative absence data for all employees (with and without disabilities), begin-

ning four years before the programme started and covering four years during

its implementation, which is ongoing today. Our analysis found that absences

from work among employees with disabilities, due to both illness and injury,

decreased after participation in the programme, with weaker evidence in the

case of absences due to injury.

The remainder of the article is organized into ve sections. In the rst

section, we analyse research on disability and absenteeism in organizations

in order to elaborate our hypotheses. The second section presents our data,

including the case description and the quasi-experimental research design. In

the third section we present our results for absence due to illness and injury,

which are analysed in the fourth section, where we also discuss the limitations

of the study. In the fth section, we present our conclusions and possible areas

for future research.