Beyond the Autistic Strengths Narrative: How Autonomy, Anxiety, and Attention Constrain Participation and Recognition in Neurodiverse Teams

Background: Strengths-based narratives of autism often presume that autistic individuals’ expertise will naturally translate into better outcomes for the teams they work with. However, such perspectives overlook the fundamentally relational nature of collaborative work, in which teams infer, evaluate, and recognize members’ knowledge and abilities through social interaction. When autistic communication and cognitive styles diverge from neurotypical teamwork norms, autistic individuals’ expertise may remain unrecognized in team contexts. Methods: Our data consist of semi-structured interviews with 35 autistic adults from a larger study and two newly collected serial focus groups with five additional autistic adults, all of whom had experience with team-based collaboration in academic or workplace settings. Using phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis, we identified recurring patterns in participants’ lived experiences of teamwork. Results: We identified three predominant structural barriers that limit autistic people’s access to and participation in teamwork: (a) Autonomy , reflecting a preference for independent work often arising from mismatches with dominant collaborative norms; (b) anxiety , shaped by lifelong experiences of stigma and neuronormative social expectations that constrain knowledge sharing; and (c) attention , referring to the cognitive, social, and sensory demands of teamwork that limit sustained engagement. Together, these barriers can operate incrementally, filtering out autistic individuals’ contributions before teams integrate them into their collective knowledge. Conclusion: These findings reframe autistic individuals’ challenges in neurodiverse teamwork as structural rather than individual. By highlighting how neuronormative team environments constrain the visibility of autistic expertise, this study contributes to autism and organizational research as well as team cognition theory. The findings also suggest the need for structural changes in team environments that normalize diverse communication styles, work preferences, and approaches to collaboration to foster more neuroinclusive teamwork.