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Introduction
While there is no apparent consensus on what distinguishes the role of a line manager from other management roles, line management essentially concerns responsibility for directing non-managerial employees in the direction of accomplishing goals set at a higher organisational level (Sims et al., 2001). What more broadly defines contemporary line management is the impact of the external environment on practice, including the requirement of “leaner” or “flatter” structures, resulting in line managers increasingly expected to take on the responsibilities and pressures of middle management roles (Hale, 2005).
A further trend is the increased expectation of line managers to be involved in HRM practice (Dick and Hyde, 2006). The upshot from this trend is more line manager responsibility for putting HRM policies into practice. However, placing expectations on line managers has proven to be problematic. For instance, research stresses a dissonance of opinions between line managers and HRM practitioners on the detail of everyday HRM practice (Whittaker and Marchington, 2003; Maxwell and Watson, 2006), line managers report insufficient support in their new HRM role (Gibb, 2003) and line managers lack time and resources to acquire sufficient confidence to take up specialist HRM roles (Beattie, 2006). The result is a range of significant shortcomings in the HRM competencies of line managers (McGuire et al., 2008).
A specialised HRM practice line managers are expected to increasingly observe is managing diversity. Managing diversity concerns creating work-based cultures seeking, respecting, valuing and harnessing difference (Schneider, 2001). Diversity defined by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2018) is:
[…] about recognising difference, but not actively leveraging it to drive organisational success. It’s acknowledging the benefit of having a range of perspectives in decision-making and the workforce being representative of the organisation’s customers.
There are many facets to diversity, with diversity conventionally associated with age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and disability. The focus of the research is disability, defined as a product of social and economic structures, with structures leading to institutional forms of exclusion and cultural attitudes embedded in social practices (Terzi, 2004). Applied to the context of the current research, disability is the contribution of employers to the disabling process.
The study, however, represents a departure from conventional takes on disability. The current...