Through their empathy, care and nurturance, benevolent leaders can help employees with disabilities surmount their disability stigma and smile at their work and work environment. The primary aim of our research is to examine how benevolent leadership contributes to the well-being of employees with disabilities. The participants in our study comprised employees with disabilities from firms located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Our results revealed the relationships between benevolent leadership and the three components of the well-being among employees with disabilities including perceived discrimination, job satisfaction and need for recovery. Disability inclusive climate was also found to mediate these relationships. Moreover, attachment anxiety acted as an enhancer for the effects of disability inclusive climate on the well-being while attachment avoidance was found to attenuate these effects except for the impact on need for recovery.

Introduction

Employees with disabilities are a ‘largely untapped human resource’ for organizations (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2008, p. 256) albeit the evidence demonstrates no significant performance and productivity differences between people with disabilities and those without disabilities (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2008). People with disabilities still have on average lower levels of employment, job security, income, pay satisfaction, job satisfaction, and overall quality of work life than people without disabilities (Konrad, Moore, Ng, Doherty, & Breward, 2013; Schur et al., 2017; Schur, Kruse, & Blanck, 2013; Shantz, Wang, & Malik, 2018; Wubulihasimu, Brouwer, & Van Baal, 2015). In the Vietnamese context, Disabilities Law 2010 and its clauses on benefits for organizations that hire people with disabilities have had some influence on human resources (HR) policies of organizations (Nguyen, 2016). However, there still have been challenges for many of them to socially include and foster the well-being among employees with disabilities (Nguyen & Thu, 2015; Voice of Vietnam (VOV), 2016). Work-related well-being alludes to “the overall quality of an employee’s experience and functioning at work” (Grant et al., 2007, p. 52). Since well-being is a crucial indicator of the effective social inclusion of employees with disabilities into an organization and its work activities (Cavanagh et al., 2017), there is a need for scholars and practitioners to decipher more antecedents behind the well-being of employees with disabilities (Ababneh, 2016; Cavanagh et al., 2017; Dwertmann & Boehm, 2016).