Job demands and job resources from the perspective of hearing-impaired employees in South Africa : exploration, development and validation

Abstract

South Africa's government has formally acknowledged disability issues and drafted legislation targeting the workplace. These legal instruments regulate affirmative action initiatives and prohibit unfair discrimination against persons with disability. South African legislation on employment does prescribe reasonable accommodation of persons with disability within the work environment. However, seemingly the country still lacks legitimate insight into the situation of disability groups. It can be deduced that research in this field should be disability-specific. Therefore, the present investigation focused on the sub-group of hearing-impaired employees (HIEs) in South Africa. Job demands and job resources underlie employees' wellbeing and performance. Therefore, perspective is necessary on job characteristics that HIEs in South Africa experience as job demands or resources. Such a focus should lead to insight that can be used to promote this group's wellbeing and performance. Furthermore, there is an international trend in workplace-level findings of hearing impairment being associated with health-impairment. The case can be argued that HIEs' job demands are not being controlled. This raises a question about awareness of job characteristics that HIEs experience as job demands -energy-consuming. The present study's further aim was to investigate this issue of awareness from the standpoint of HIEs in South Africa. The research was conducted through both a qualitative and quantitative study. The qualitative investigation was approached from a phenomenological perspective and was based on the paradigm of social constructivism. Sampling targeted the marginal population, while respecting sampling requirements. The methods were purposive, quota and snowball sampling. Data were gathered from pre-lingually deaf (n = 8), post-lingually deaf (n = 4) and hard-of-hearing (n = 2) employees in South Africa. An in-depth perspective was formed about job characteristics HIEs experience as job demands, as well as job resources. During analysis, certain of the derived categories for job demands seemed clearly norm-deviant. The quantitative investigation sought to develop a scale to reflect the mentioned deviant themes of job demands, which emerged from the qualitative inquiry. The scale's development followed two stages. The first phase was to develop a scale that measures job demands unique to HIEs in South Africa, and the second was to determine the preliminary validity of the scale (N = 85). The second phase entailed the preliminary validation, namely investigating the psychometric properties of the newly-developed Job demands Scale for Hearing-impaired Employees. The results provided evidence for construct validity and adequate reliabilities were found for all three overall scales and the corresponding 10 sub-scales. It was concluded that the newly-developed scale for measuring job demands unique to HIEs was confirmed preliminarily as valid and reliable. In the final analysis, this study helps provide insight into human resource strategies at the workplace for managing HIEs' wellbeing and performance better. This is done by proactively detecting environmental barriers that impede them. At the end, recommendations were made for practice and future research.