Not an Ideal Worker, Not a Disabled Worker: The Experience of Disclosing Invisible Disabilities at Work

Abstract

Employees living with invisible disabilities, such as mental health conditions and chronic pain, face decisions around disclosing their disability in the workplace. Several disclosure models describe how employees make disclosure decisions about concealable stigmas; however, the disclosure process may not unfold the same way for all identities. Compared to other concealable stigmatized identities, such as sexual orientation and religion, invisible disabilities carry unique implications for workplace productivity and performance. Our study sought to better understand how employees with invisible disabilities decide whether and when to disclose their disability to others at work. We conducted a thematic analysis based on interviews with 30 employees who had experience disclosing an invisible disability in the workplace. Most participants adopted a default position of concealment and disclosed only when they thought it was necessary. Our findings highlight that organizational expectations of employees to be “ideal workers” played a central role in how participants navigated disclosure decisions. Specifically, participants concealed their invisible disability because disability stereotypes are discrepant with their organizations’ expectations of ideal workers. At the same time, they disclosed when they felt that, due to their disability, they were not performing or behaving as ideal workers. We also discuss how a challenge for many participants is that disclosure targets did not always consider invisible disabilities to be legitimate disabilities. Thus, employees with invisible disabilities navigate a double bind during disclosure, where they may not be perceived as either an ideal or a disabled worker.