Employers’ attitude,intention,skills and barriers in relation to employment of vulnerable workers

1 Introduction

Employment is an important way to participate in society. Meaningful work meets the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness [1]. Work is, therefore, important to the health and well-being of people in general and in particular of vulnerable workers, which include people with a disability, the long-term unemployed and school dropouts [2, 3]. Aside from the benefits for the individual, organizations also benefit from employing vulnerable workers. It increases profitability (e.g., profits, turnover and retention, and company image) and competitive advantage (e.g., diverse customers, customer loyalty and satisfaction, and innovation) [4]. Despite the benefits of employing vulnerable workers, employment rates of these groups remain remarkably low when compared to the general population [5–8].

Understanding how vulnerable workers can be part of the labor market has been the subject of research for many years. Most studies focused on supply-side factors making people job-ready, such as examining the effectiveness of reintegration, and developing interventions to support people to find work [9]. Currently, there is increasing attention for demand-side factors by stimulating employers to employ workers from vulnerable groups. The involvement of employers is critical to the success of active labor market policies [9]. An example is job carving to adjust business processes; this is helpful for a successful and sustainable employment of vulnerable workers [10, 11]. However, relatively little is known about what factors influence organizations to hire vulnerable workers, more specifically the relation between motives, actually hiring and retention, and what is needed to influence this. Partly because many studies used the intention to hire people from vulnerable groups as a proxy for actual hiring, while validation of this conjecture is lacking (e.g., [12–14]).

Next to economic factors and job fit, other factors like social legitimacy/expectations and a good public image play an important role in hiring people from vulnerable groups [15]. Several studies have also focused on employers’ perception of the employability of vulnerable workers, but these produced conflicting results. Most employers express positive attitudes towards hiring vulnerable workers, but are often reluctant to actually hire them [16–18]. This is partly due to negative beliefs including concerns about work performance, safety, productivity, lack of employability and skills [18], and potential barriers such as a lack of financial support within the company [19, 20]. Another complicating factor in research is that differences in governmental support policies between and even within countries might affect employer perceptions of the employability of vulnerable groups.

Although there is some knowledge about motives to hire vulnerable workers and organizational factors that relate to hiring these workers, little is known how to convert hiring intentions of employers to actual employing vulnerable workers. An integrative framework to systematically examine inclusive employer behavior may be helpful to structure factors and relations, and thereby identifying targets for interventions. The Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction provides such a framework [21]. This model is the update of the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior [22, 23], both of which focus on predicting the intention of people to behave in a certain way. The Integrative Model additionally includes the translation of intention into actual behavior. The Integrative Model could explain the conflicting results of previous studies and provide a better overview of the factors that affect employers’ hiring and retention of vulnerable workers. For instance, Fraser et al. used the Theory of Planned Behavior to predict intentions of employers (N = 92) to hire people with a disability [13]. They showed that employers had a much stronger intention to hire workers with a disability when employers (a) had a positive attitude toward workers with a disability, (b) thought that other employers deemed it important to hire workers with a disability (i.e., subjective norm), and (c) thought they were able to hire workers with a disability (i.e., behavioral control or self-efficacy). Araten-Bergman also showed that the attitude, subjective norm, and self-efficacy of employers (N = 250) predicted the intention of managers to hire people with a disability, but not the actual hiring behaviors [24]. The Integrative Model does include the translation of intention into actual behavior and describes that lack of skills to perform the hiring behaviors and contextual constraints that hinder this translation. Therefore, insights in skills and contextual constraints are also needed to determine which factors drive employers’ hiring behavior, aside from the intention, which is influenced by attitude, subjective norm and self-efficacy.

Our aim is to further explore the factors of the Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction, that is, attitude, intention, skills and barriers, in relation to actual employment of vulnerable workers. This offers more insight into key demand-side factors associated with employing vulnerable workers, which may provide new leads for vocational rehabilitation interventions. We also examine differences in the relationships between factors of the Integrative Model and the hiring of vulnerable workers by size of organization. This is important since organizational factors, such as having an human resources-department in charge of recruiting, hiring and training, may result in different skills and contextual constraints between small and large organizations [25].

2 Method

3 Results

Organizations had a median number of 28 employees (IQR: 9–100), and on average a similar percentage of employees with low and high educational levels. Of the 11,837 organizations, 5,601 (47%) were inclusive organizations and 6,236 (53%) organizations were not inclusive. Inclusive organizations were larger in size, had employed slightly more low-educated people, and the mean age of employees was similar in comparison with non-inclusive organizations (Table 2).

The results of the present study indicate that the Integrative Model of Fishbein and Ajzen is useful to understand the behavior of organizations. The concepts of this model distinguished well between organizations that employ vulnerable workers and those who do not. Earlier findings showed that attitude, subjective norms and self-efficacy are related to employers’ intentions to hire people from vulnerable labor market groups [13, 24]; our results expand on that by showing that attitude, intention, skills and barriers are related to actually employing vulnerable groups. A stronger intention, more skills and less barriers were positively related to employing vulnerable workers. The results differed for the size of the organization. Intention, several barriers and skills were more important for employing vulnerable workers in small organizations than in large ones.

In contrast to previous studies which found that a positive attitude was related to a stronger intention to hire people from vulnerable groups [18–20], we observed that inclusive organizations expected more negative impact than non-inclusive organizations. One explanation is our operationalization of attitude. We measured negative financial expectations and a set of items restricted to costly supervision, productivity loss and organizational adjustments. In contrast, studies that found a positive attitude to be related to hiring people with a disability measured other aspects of attitude, such as positive expectations (e.g., better social responsible image), a more comprehensive set of negative expectations (e.g., concerns about co-workers’ reactions to employees from vulnerable groups) [20], and a lack of employability and skills [18]. Inclusive organizations may also intrinsically value employment of vulnerable groups, despite expected negative impacts. Another explanation is that we investigated actual employing behavior and previous studies mostly intention to hire. The inclusive organizations in the present study may have more realistic insights into the negative impact of employing people from vulnerable groups which would explain their more negative attitude compared to non-inclusive organizations. Although inclusive organizations have a more negative attitude, they still employed and also intended to hire vulnerable workers. This stronger intention is probably explained by other factors that influence their intention, such as self-efficacy and subjective norms.

According to the Integrative Model of Fishbein and Ajzen, a person’s intention to perform a behavior can be converted into actual behavior if one has the skills and can overcome contextual constraints [21]. Our results showed that inclusive-related human resources skills have a strong impact on actually employing vulnerable workers. Organizations that are less familiar with governmental incentives, supporting services and how people from a vulnerable labor market groups can be recruited, and those organizations that are less able to adapt working conditions to those people were less likely to employ vulnerable workers. Previous studies also indicate that employment of those people is hampered by a lack of awareness of the use of legal issues and governmental support to promote and facilitate employment of vulnerable workers [10, 28–30]. Aside from inclusive-related human resources skills, our results imply that some general human resources policies and practices are also beneficial in employing people from vulnerable groups. It seems that inclusive organizations have more adequate facilities to employ vulnerable workers and are better in overcoming hurdles, such as personalizing work performance, development and task content. With regard to barriers, we observed that inclusive organizations have better economic conditions (e.g., financial results and employment opportunity) than non-inclusive organizations. Therefore, well-performing organizations have more possibilities and are possibly more willing to employ vulnerable workers. Furthermore, human resources skills as well as economic constraints seem to be particularly important for small to medium organizations. Fraser et al.also found that small organizations had a lower self-efficacy than larger organizations [25]; they believed that senior management was less committed to hire workers from vulnerable groups, had fewer job openings and were less likely to receive tax credits for hiring these workers compared to large organizations.

Currently, there is little focus of vocational rehabilitation on demand-side factors, but the Integrative Model of Fishbein and Ajzen supports a systematic analysis of the factors that influence employing vulnerable workers, which offers opportunities to better target interventions. For rehabilitation professionals our results imply that in particular small and medium organizations may benefit from their help and support. Organizations willing to hire vulnerable workers but lacking skills, experience or perceiving barriers can be supported by rehabilitation professionals by, for example, making them aware of economic incentives and helping them with the recruitment process. The review of Bonaccio et al. also describes that recruiting qualified people with a disability is a challenge for organizations [31], and that community-based organizations specialized in supporting employment needs of people in vulnerable groups play a key role in a successful hiring process. For example, they can assist in job advertising and ensuring that recruitment processes and messages do not act as barriers [28, 31] highlight that potentially effective hiring and retention practices, such as using available tax incentives, internship opportunities, mentor programs, and formation of disability-focused employee resource groups or networks are hardly used and could be introduced by vocational rehabilitation agencies. For employers that do not intend to hire people from vulnerable labor market groups, rehabilitation professionals could increase the intention by influencing the attitude toward hiring people from vulnerable labor market groups, subjective norm and self-efficacy [13, 24]. Insight into the motivations, preferences and needs of organizations are also required to successfully influence the intention of employers [9].

The strength of the present study is the use of a large dataset of employers across all Dutch sectors, making it possible to analyze differences by size of organizations. This is one of the first explorative studies into the use of the Integrative Model of Fishbein and Ajzen to structure employer factors and employment behavior [21]. It shows that the Integrative Model is useful in explaining employment of vulnerable workers. Future research is needed to validate other aspects of the model, like subjective norm, self-efficacy, and other barriers (e.g., organizational culture) and skills. The relatively low response rate (20%) is a limitation of the study. As organizations of all sectors were still included and we also investigated differences by size of organization, our results are likely to be representative for Dutch organizations. A third limitation is that the perceptions of a single person within an organization filling in the questionnaire about employer factors may be limited, and the self-reported measures may be susceptible to socially desirable answers, especially as it relates to a vulnerable population. This may have led to an underestimation of the observed relationships. Employer factors may differ upon specific groups. Yet, in our study we could not distinguish between specific vulnerable groups. Fourth, as we compared inclusive organizations with non-inclusive organizations, we could not assess how employer factors differ between different kind of inclusive organization. For example, between organizations with many or few vulnerable employees, or between organizations that employ people from different vulnerable groups. It seems likely that the more vulnerable workers an organization has the larger the differences become with non-inclusive organizations. Further research is needed to examine whether our results differ according to the type of disability (e.g. physical compared to mental disabilities). Finally, due to the cross-sectional nature of our study, causal inferences cannot be made. This is especially the case for inclusive-related human resources skills, of which we do not know whether better skills facilitate hiring vulnerable workers or whether organizations improve their skills because they hire those people. Longitudinal research is needed to clarify the temporal relationship.

5 Conclusion

We found that all included concepts of the Integrative Model of Fishbein and Ajzen were associated with employment of vulnerable workers. This supports the use of the Integrative Model to understand employers’ behavior and to provide an overview of possible targets for interventions on demand-side factors in vocational rehabilitation. We observed several demand-side factors related to the employment of vulnerable workers that were particularly important for small to medium organizations. The findings indicate that vocational rehabilitation interventions need to pay particular attention to employers’ barriers regarding the economic condition of the organization and skills to recruit vulnerable workers, the use of government incentives and supporting services, and to personalize and adapt jobs to fit the needs of vulnerable workers. Future research is needed to determine which demand-side strategies for vocational rehabilitation professionals are effective to increase the intention of employers by influencing attitude, subjective norms and self-efficacy, and which strategies are effective to improve skills and lower barriers of employers who have the intention of hiring vulnerable workers.