The Role of Leadership Support for Career-Inclusion in Service-Delivery at Level-6 Hospitals in Kenya

Work plays a critical role in life satisfaction for employees with disability. Career-inclusion facilitates them in service-delivery through capacity-adjusted deployment, empowerment, and job match. Leadership support for career-inclusion had not been researched and its influence on service-delivery from employees with disability in level-6 hospitals in Kenya, thus this research. The objective was to establish the influence of career-inclusion on service-delivery at level-6 hospitals in Kenya. It was cross-sectional research, using two questionnaires and an observation checklist. The target populations were 229 employees with disability and 229 supervisors sampled by census from five purposively selected hospitals. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 29 and N-Vivo version 15 for quantitative and qualitative data, respectively, and Pearson’s correlation coefficients and ANOVA to test associations and hypotheses, with a cut-off of p-value < 0.05 indicating significance. The response rate for employees with disability was 211 (92.1%) and 196 (85.6%) for supervisors. Career-inclusion contributes 46% (R².460) positive change in service-delivery with an F statistic of 151.472 and a significant p-value of 0.000 < 0.05. being greater than the critical value of 3.909 at a significant p-value of 0.000 <0.05. Thus, the null hypothesis, ‘career-inclusion has no significant influence on service-delivery at level-6 hospitals in Kenya,’ was rejected. A respondent with disability said, “…my deployment was adjusted…capacity initially… I have since been transferred…I am not happy…I have not been promoted for a long time…there is no work-adjusted hours or schedules…some tasks allocated are okay, but others cause…strain…” In conclusion, employees with disability are uniquely talented and have potential that can be exploited through leadership support for career-inclusion, backed by evidence to dissipate misconceptions. Career-inclusion has a positive influence on service delivery from employees with disability. Leaders need to improve career-inclusion by addressing the paucity of timely data, barriers to inclusion, and providing evidence to showcase the contributions of employees with disability and the importance of offering them support. Intentional regular creation of awareness is invaluable.