The “Social Dance”: Sociality Strategies and Trade-Offs for Autistic Workers
通过两项研究，揭示自闭症员工为应对工作社交需求而采取的社交策略，以及这些策略在实用性与幸福感之间的权衡，对管理者理解神经多样性员工有参考价值。
We unpack the specific challenges of engaging in social interaction through the lens of a unique workforce population – employees with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Across two studies, we highlight a novel psychological mechanism that links these employees’ effortful strategies to manage their social interactions with workplace outcomes. In Study 1, we employ a grounded theory methodology, including interviews and diary entries, to understand how autistic workers forge different “sociality strategies” for responding to the daily social demands of work. In Study 2, we employ a field survey of autistic workers to further test the relationship between these sociality strategies and employment outcomes such as job insecurity and well-being. We find that the effectiveness of sociality strategies can best be understood as culminating in a double-edged sword of pragmatic vs. well-being tradeoffs. By focusing on individuals with autism, our findings highlight the broadly generalizable issue of a problematic and effortful process underlying social demands in organizations, neurodivergent workers’ responses to those demands, tradeoffs navigated along the way, and the role of neurotypical allyship.