Group &Organization Management, Ahead of Print.
In their focused study on the effect of organizational language on workers’ behaviors related to disclosing a disability, Santuzzi and coauthors (2024) explore how employees with disabilities (EWD) weigh the decision to disclose their conditions to employers. We advance this work by offering a relevant theoretical perspective, Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT; Lind & Van den Bos, 2002) for considering EWD’s decisions to disclose. UMT holds that employees strongly look for cues of workplace procedural and interactional justice, in moments of uncertainty. We assert that disclosing one’s disability in moments like those studied by Santuzzi and colleagues (2024) pose high uncertainty for employees who look for signals of just treatment. We explore those processes as they relate to disability disclosure and introduce practical suggestions for organizations to reduce uncertainty surrounding disability disclosure.