This study examines how neurodivergent employees in multinational organizations experience workplace inclusion across diverse cultural contexts. It explores how organizational policies, cultural norms and managerial practices interact to shape the daily realities of employees with conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia, grounded in a predominantly social and interactional model of disability. This article addresses the gap between high-level diversity policies and the lived experiences of neurodivergent employees, with particular attention to the role of national and organizational cultures.
A qualitative, cross-cultural research design was employed using focus groups with neurodivergent employees across three culturally distinct countries representing Western, East Asian and Latin American contexts. Participants (n = 30) were drawn from multinational organizations in technology, finance, manufacturing and professional services. Thematic analysis was conducted with a cross-cultural comparative lens, guided by the Social Identity Theory, the Self-Categorization Theory, the Organizational Justice Theory and comparative/cross-cultural HRM frameworks, to theorize how global neurodiversity policies are translated into local practices and outcomes.
The study reveals substantial divergences between stated organizational diversity policies and employees' lived realities, with cultural norms profoundly influencing both the implementation and perception of neuro-inclusive practices across contexts. The findings support a process in which global policies are locally interpreted by managers and filtered through cultural norms, shaping perceived justice and psychological safety, which in turn influence disclosure, access to accommodations and people-and-performance consequences.
For multinational organizations, effective neuro-inclusion requires policies that are globally coherent yet locally adaptable, supported by global “guardrails” of non-negotiable inclusion and justice standards and locally tailored “playbooks” of context-sensitive practices, including culturally adapted manager training, participatory policy design with neurodivergent employees and feedback and measurement frameworks to monitor fairness, psychological safety and accommodation effectiveness over time.
This article situates neurodiversity within a comparative, cross-cultural framework and privileges the voices of neurodivergent employees across borders, offering one of the few cross-country, employee-voice qualitative examinations of neuro-inclusion in multinational firms. It theorizes a process linking global policies, culture-shaped managerial sensemaking, perceived organizational justice and psychological safety and disclosure and accommodation practices to people-and-performance outcomes, and proposes a guardrails–playbooks architecture to embed neurodiversity into global diversity and inclusion strategies while respecting cultural variation.
