Michele Swift

Purpose. Persons with disabilities (PWD) are among the largest and most diverse minority groups and among the most disadvantaged in terms of employment. Entrepreneurial pursuit is often advocated as a path toward employment, inclusion, and equality, yet few studies have investigated earning variation among PWD.

Design/methodology/approach. The authors draw on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), and the disability employment and entrepreneurship literature to develop hypotheses about who among PWD are likely to earn more (less) from entrepreneurial pursuits. The authors then conduct analyses on the nationally representative sample of the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) by including all PWD engaged in entrepreneurial pursuit, and matching each to an organizationally employed counterpart of the same gender and race and of similar age and disability severity (n ≈ 810).

Findings. Entrepreneurial pursuit has a stronger negative association with the earnings of PWD who experience earlier disability onset ages, those who report more unmet accommodation needs, and those who are female.

Originality/value. First, this study applies SCCT to help bridge the literature on organizational employment barriers for PWD and entrepreneurs with disabilities. Second, we call into question the logic of neoliberalism about entrepreneurship by showing that barriers to organizational employment impact entrepreneurial pursuit decisions and thereby earnings. Third, we extend the understanding of entrepreneurial earnings among PWD by examining understudied disability attributes and demographic attributes. Lastly, this study is among the first to use a matched sample to empirically test the impact of entrepreneurial pursuit on the earnings of PWD.

This study provides a direct test of social exchange theory to knowledge sharing from the provider perspective by examining the effects of both perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived coworker support (PCS) on their direct knowledge sharing with their coworkers. Also examined is the moderating effect of providers’ perception of the tacitness of their knowledge on the relationship between these different sources of support and their knowledge sharing. Results show perceived coworker support (PCS) has a significant positive effect on provider knowledge sharing but that the relationship only holds when knowledge tacitness is high. Contrary to expectations, perceived organizational support (POS) did not have a significant positive effect on providers’ knowledge sharing and that this relationship did not depend on providers’ perceptions of their knowledge tacitness. The implications of these findings to research and practice are discussed.

Prior research suggests that people with disabilities often do not request needed workplace accommodations, though relatively few studies address which factors influence the extent of such potentially self-limiting behavior. Drawing on workplace disability, help seeking, and social identity literature, this study proposes and tests a model of request withholding frequency using survey data from 279 people with hearing impairments. Consistent with expectations, older employees withheld requests less frequently; however, there was no main effect of gender. Moreover, the strength of the relationship between age and request withholding frequency was significantly weaker when the disability was more severe and when the age of disability onset was earlier. Similarly, disability severity influenced the strength of the relationship between gender and request withholding frequency, though the age of disability onset did not. These findings are consistent with social identity theory, in that those individual differences and disability attributes that shape social identities also appear to affect decisions to request disability accommodation. In practical terms, managers need to not only be supportive of disability accommodation requests but also recognize that some employees, such as young persons with disabilities, may need even more support, and support in a form that affirms or minimizes threats to other salient identities, such as their youth. Additional implications for management research and practice are discussed.

Drawing from research on achievement motivation and social exchange, a model is developed highlighting how goal orientations provide a framework for individuals’ knowledge sharing by shaping how they cognitively value the costs and benefits associated with sharing their knowledge. We argue each of the goal orientations are associated with preferences for sharing specific types of knowledge and a focus on different aspects of the knowledge provider-recipient relationship.

We examine the key compensation issues pertaining to the top management team that occur during the early stages of growth in new ventures, specifically those anticipating rapid growth such as in technology-intensive markets. Similar to other new ventures, high-growth technology ventures are small in size but they have a goal of rapid growth giving rise to a need for resources and managerial talent to sustain the growth. New ventures are likely to compete in the market with larger organizations for top management team members. As a result, new ventures in rapid growth technology markets experience some unique compensation challenges. Critical for these firms is the issue of distributing equity among members of the founding team and structuring compensation to attract and retain non-founder executives. Drawing from the human resource management and entrepreneurship literatures, this paper develops a set of propositions predicting top management team compensation strategies for rapidly growing new ventures. Directions for future research are also discussed.