Reasons for job loss: a review of employment termination studies of mentally retarded workers.

The current emphasis on employment preparation for mentally retarded people requires that more attention be focused on job retention. Knowledge of the reasons why mentally retarded workers were fired from their jobs could contribute to that effort. This article reviews studies over a 35 year period that have examined job loss in mentally retarded workers. First, reasons for job loss that relate to workers' vocational competence were separated from other reasons for job loss, such as economic and family factors. Then, reasons relating to vocational competence were classified into four categories: job responsibility, task-production skills, task-related social skills, and personal-social skills. Reasons for job loss among mentally retarded workers are broadly distributed across both social and nonsocial domains, including job responsibility factors such as attendance and punctuality, task-production factors such as inadequate quality and rate of work, task-related social skill deficits such as not following instructions and responding inappropriately to criticism, and personal-social inadequacies such as inappropriate dress, bizarre and aggressive behavior, and inadequate or offensive verbal repertoires. The results of the review are discussed in relation to training issues for job retention of mentally retarded workers.