The “Social Dance”: Sociality Strategies and Tradeoffs for Autistic Workers

Abstract

We unpack the specific challenges of engaging in social interaction through the lens of a unique workforce population – employees with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Across two studies, we highlight a novel psychological mechanism that links these employees’ effortful strategies to manage their social interactions with workplace outcomes. In Study 1, we employ a grounded theory methodology, including interviews and diary entries, to understand how autistic workers forge different “sociality strategies” for responding to the daily social demands of work. In Study 2, we employ a field survey of autistic workers to further test the relationship between these sociality strategies and employment outcomes such as job insecurity and well-being. We find that the effectiveness of sociality strategies can best be understood as culminating in a double-edged sword of pragmatic vs. well-being tradeoffs. By focusing on individuals with autism, our findings highlight the broadly generalizable issue of a problematic and effortful process underlying social demands in organizations, neurodivergent workers’ responses to those demands, tradeoffs navigated along the way, and the role of neurotypical allyship.