Ambassador of People with Disabilities in the Workplace—Conducive Demographic and Professional Characteristics

Abstract

This paper introduces into the analysis the concept of the ambassador of people with disability in the workplace. A kind and friendly person in the workplace, who creates a positive atmosphere around people with disabilities, may play a crucial role in their adaptation on the open labor market. Presence of such a person is especially important in entities that did not previously employ people with disabilities. It is vital that employers who would like to employ people with disability possess knowledge about demographic and professional characteristics that predispose employees to perform this special role. On the one hand, in this article we attempted to evaluate the differentiation in the perception of the issue of disability due to demographic and professional characteristics of respondents, and, on the other hand, to identify features that favor being an “ambassador of people with disabilities” in the workplace. The study was conducted in 2019 on the representative samples of Internet users from 8 European countries using Computer-Assisted Internet Interviews. For the purposes of the study, we used the Attitudes to Disability Scale WHOQOL Group test and a proprietary questionnaire. As for the methods of analysis, we relied on the classical analysis of variance and logistic regression. The conducted study showed that the perception of the issue of disability is significantly related to demographic and professional characteristics of respondents, and that the role of the ambassador is the most appropriate for a middle-aged woman with a good knowledge of disability issues, indecisive in the workplace.