Beyond Disability Management and Towards Health

  • Eric is an Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology PhD student at Saint Mary’s University. Eric’s work seeks to support organizations in creating inclusive and psychologically healthy workplaces through which they can realize their potential by enabling diverse communities to obtain, retain, and thrive in gainful employment. For this purpose, he studies mechanisms that can foster disability and EDIA solutions centered around mental health. With this work Eric seeks to improve mental health and disability literacy broadly and advance the workplace for Canadians with disabilities and other marginalized groups.

Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) research has long suggested that the working environment significantly affects worker mental health (Warr, 1987). Unfortunately, this mental health aspect of work is underrepresented in disability research and practice (Sundar et al., 2017). Therefore, to improve worker health, this project seeks to explore disability support strategies that extend beyond traditional accommodation. This extension highlights sustainable workplace practices that incorporate elements of OHP (e.g., social support, stigma reduction, job-person fit, job crafting) to manage disability and promote functional health.

This project consists of 2 phases:

Phase 1 involves qualitative interviews with workers living with disability to identify key work factors that affect full participation at work. These data will be used to develop the survey for Phase 2.

Phase 2 utilizes a diary study designed to understand workers’ ongoing daily work experiences and the effects of occupational resources and demands (e.g., workload, leadership behaviours, disability autonomy, support) on workers’ functioning and wellbeing.

This project aims to create an evidence-based disability support framework that incorporates non-traditional accommodations to address diverse disability needs. In addition, this work seeks to develop a measure of Person-Work/Accommodation Fit to provide further insight into planning and evaluating disability support strategy at work.

This project is co-funded in partnership with Mitacs and Research Nova Scotia.