Abstract:
Employees play a very essential role in achieving organisational objectives. As
performance management of employees is one of the critical undertakings of human
capital management to achieve business goals. The current workforce comprises of
employees with disabilities whose performance management is equally important.
However, the performance management has not been without its challenges. In this line,
this study explored the challenges facing performance management of employees with
disabilities. The study was a case study of Safaricom Ltd. Ten line manager were
interviewed and the data analysed by qualitative content analysis where the identified key
challenges were grouped under respective themes and then discussed in line with the
thematic approach in the content analysis. Results were reported by means of narratives
with explanations of the various major issues that were captured. Elaborate explanations
were given describing the pertinent issues that were raised. The study found during
performance review, there is lack of openness by employees with disabilities in stating
strengths, weaknesses and special adjustments. Differentiating choice from disability
based behaviours in another challenge that many face. There is a challenge establishing
the exact utility of special adjustments and lack of dynamism in the performance
management system to reflect changes such as improvement or deterioration in the nature
and severity of the disability. The study identified inadequate training of the line
managers as one of the challenges that affected performance management process for
employees with disability. With this in mind, there is need in improving manager’s
ability to manage employees with disability in areas like; knowing what constitutes
reasonable adjustments and designing mechanism to establish efficacy and reflect
changes, offer relevant training and adequate training to the line managers to enable them
handle performance management for employees with disability effectively. The study
noted that the firm should introduce a practice of dynamic system which caters for the
nature and severity of disability.
