Employees with disabilities encounter a persistent tension between fluctuating health stability and challenging work environments. We discovered that employees with disabilities engage in a ‘cope-crafting’ strategy—a distinctive combination of proactive job crafting and coping strategies to navigate their work demands and health challenges. Cope-crafting extends the job crafting research (Tims & Bakker, 2010; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) by identifying adaptive strategies used by employees with disabilities, who typically engage in traditional job crafting strategies less frequently than non-disabled counterparts (Brucker & Sundar, 2020).

We conducted 40 qualitative interviews with employees with disabilities in Indonesia. They had physical (30%), sensory (23%), mental (33%), and cognitive (15%) disabilities. Adopting a process perspective (Langley et al., 2013), this study focused on how employees simultaneously navigated their health and work challenges and how these cope-crafting strategies evolved over time. Our findings reveal that cope-crafting is a dynamic process driven by the interplay between disability-related health stability and workplace inclusivity, with the role of resource availability as a catalyst for change. Cope-crafting strategy enables employees with disabilities to continuously balance between internal and external resources with the cumulative strain of fluctuating health challenges and work demands.

This interaction forms a 2x2 matrix of four strategies (i.e., maintain, modify, stop, and adopt new) classified by the scale of change, including incremental and radical change in cope-crafting strategy (see Figure 1). Incremental strategies capture small-scale, gradual, and continuous adjustments to existing strategies. Radical strategies capture large-scale or discontinuous changes to the current strategies. For example, (1) Maintain (high health stability, high workplace inclusivity): P44, who has a physical disability, continued to utilise humor to reduce awkwardness and increase bonding with his coworkers; (2) Modify (low health stability, high workplace inclusivity): P36, who has Autistic Spectrum Disorder, proactively adjusted his transportation options to cope with feeling overwhelmed when commuting to the office; (3) Stop (low health stability, low workplace inclusivity): P47, who has a physical disability, quit from her job due to inaccessible workplace building; and (4) Adopt new (high health stability, low workplace inclusivity): P04, who has a visual impairment, pursued higher education to increase his qualifications and sustain employment opportunities.

These findings highlight the continuous health challenges of employees with disabilities and the importance of an inclusive workplace. The need for internal and external resources requires organizations to provide individualised support mechanisms that enable employees navigating health and work challenges to ensure long-term employment.