STRESS AND ABSENTEEISM IN WORKPLACE

Stress & Absenteeism in Workplace



Stress & Absenteeism in Workplace

Introduction

Absenteeism (alternatively, absence) is an individual's lack of physical presence at a given location and time when there is a social expectation for that person to be there. An absence is a behavioural outcome or state rather than a behaviour itself, because many different actions can make up an absence, such as lying on the beach if at the same time a person is expected to conduct a face-to-face meeting with employees.

Moreover, attendance and absence should not be thought of as straightforward opposites. An individual can be absent from many settings simultaneously if groups or individuals from each of those settings have contradicting expectations. In the same way, a person can be in attendance at one location (such as work) while being absent from another (such as home), as long as different social referents generate role conflict about attendance. However, an individual can attend only one setting because attendance is merely physical presence there (Grocer, 2004). For decades researchers have often ascribed many causes to absence, leading to distinctions between involuntary and voluntary absences. Such attributions are problematic, especially when they are applied to absence measures. Those attributions can be made only on the basis of empirical relationships between absences and other variables and on solid estimates of the proportions of observed variance because of latent voluntary or involuntary factors (Aldred, 2004).

Absenteeism is a narrowly defined construct. Some researchers have suggested that absence be entrenched in a broader psychological construct such as avoidance of work, withdrawal from the work role, or adaptation to the work environment. Studying absence as an isolated phenomenon is likely to undermine the practitioners' focus on prediction, because of an absence's high proportions of specific, dynamic, and random variance. By combining many related behaviours (e.g., lateness, grievance filing, sabotage) into a broader construct or behavioural family, the combination might be characterized by more common variance and could be more readily predictable (Aldred, 2004).

Research Strategies

Researchers should not always evaluate the merits of a theory solely on percentage of variance explained. First, conceptual parsimony may be more preferable than maximisation of explained variance if the latter comes with the cost of ambiguity. Second, it is possible to find statistically significant results on the basis of chance alone.

Some have challenged the convention that a good theory of absence explains all the variance by arguing that stochastic or process theories may be better suited for explaining absence than variance theories. Essentially, a process theory tells a little story about how something comes about; but to qualify as a theoretical explanation of recurrent behaviour, the manner of the storytelling must conform to narrow specifications. A process theory is defined as follows:

X is a necessary condition for Y, but not a sufficient condition.

X will cause Y stochastically (using a random variable).

That is, whether X causes Y depends on some probabilistic process. Thus process theories, unlike variance theories, leave residual uncertainty by ...