Page 279 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

COLELLA AND STONE
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and to develop strategies for increasing the effectiveness of these interac­
tions.
At the organization and societal levels, research is needed to examine
the effectiveness of changes in organizational culture and policies and the
practices on the inclusion of persons with disabilities. Previous research has
shown that competitive or interdependent reward systems (Colella et al.,
1998; Stone & Michaels, 1994) has a negative impact on the acceptance of
people with disabilities. Also, some research has shown that community-
based awards for employing people with disabilities can alter employers'
beliefs about hiring people with disabilities (Stone, Williams, Lukaszewski,
& Feigelson, 1998).
More research of this type is warranted, because it directly addresses
the issue of how to eliminate disability discrimination. For example, re­
searchers might examine the business case for hiring employees with dis­
abilities including the extent to which employing people with disabilities
has a positive effect on organizational image or customer satisfaction levels.
Interestingly, some European countries (e.g., Germany) are quite willing to
make continued employment of persons with disabilities a major employ­
ment policy, and in those countries men with disabilities receive 93% of the
wage rates for those who are not disabled (Burkhauser & Daly, 1994). As a
result, although the United States has developed some key disability poli­
cies, research is needed to compare the effectiveness of U.S. employment
policies with those of other nations.
A third issue that makes disability discrimination unique is that peo­
ple with disabilities have impairments, which is not true about other dis­
crimination characteristics. This makes studying disability discrimination
difficult because it is not easy to determine if unequal treatment or bene­
fits are due to discriminatory behavior or actually result from decreased
functioning due to the impairment. Critiques of the legal system and reha­
bilitation fields (Hahn, 1988,1996, 2000) argue that too much attention is
placed on the impact of impairments, so that it disguises discrimination re­
sulting from attitudes and stigmatization. For example, one can argue that
someone is denied a promotion because her depression makes her "unsta­
ble" and that this is due to the impairment rather than erroneous beliefs or
stereotypes. We have both experienced reviewer comments that strongly
argued that discrimination results found in our research were because of
the impairment of the actor with a disability, not discriminatory beliefs—
even when behavior and performance were tightly controlled and compa­
rable to the comparison nondisabled actor. One implication of this is that
disability discrimination research needs to carefully control for impairment
effects to get a better understanding of what dynamics underlie discrimi­
nation. It also may mean that it is easier to conceal disability discrimination