In this article, we provide a brief review of the current and past research on leadership perceptions and performance. We then describe four principles that have emerged from many decades of research, which can provide new directions for future leadership theory and research.

As acknowledged by Lord and Dinh (2014) in their focal article, across a plethora of organizational literatures and topics of interest, there often seems to be a common theme: context matters. Although this is not a very surprising statement and may seem obvious, the surprising reality is that within a number of topics in our field, context is either superficially taken into consideration or not examined at all. This oversight has the potential to skew our understanding of important concepts. Indeed, Joshi and Roh (2009) revealed in their meta-analysis exploring team diversity that context served as a significant moderator of performance, illustrating the criticality of understanding how contextual factors may predict outcomes above and beyond individual inputs.

Lord and Dinh (2014) raise a number of important points that need to be considered in development of leadership research and practice. There are three main issues that we wish to address to support and develop their statements.

Workers with invisible disabilities encounter unique challenges compared to workers with other concealable identities and even workers with visible disabilities. These challenges occur not only in the decisions of whether to disclose the invisible disability in the workplace but also in the detection and acceptance of having a disability to disclose. Disclosure of disabilities in the workplace likely has implications for the individual worker's health, social relationships, and work performance as well as for an employing organization's outcomes. We argue that current legislation and policies might not be sensitive to the unique experiences and disclosure decisions faced by workers with invisible disabilities. We invite researchers and practitioners to consider adjustments to current legislation and workplace practices in order for employing organizations to account for the unique challenges facing workers with invisible disabilities and fully accommodate those workers.