Job demands and job resources as predictors of absence duration and frequency

Abstract

This study among 214 nutrition production employees uses the Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model to predict future company registered absenteeism. According to this model, job demands are primarily responsible for health impairment, whereas job resources lead primarily to increased motivation and attachment to work and the organization. Consistent with hypotheses derived from the JD–R model and the absenteeism literature, results of structural equation modeling analyses show that job demands are unique predictors of burnout (i.e., exhaustion and cynicism) and indirectly of absence duration, whereas job resources are unique predictors of organizational commitment, and indirectly of absence spells. These findings have implications for individual and organizational interventions aimed at reducing absenteeism.

Introduction

There exists basic agreement that job stress relates to physical and behavioral outcomes such as health complaints, burnout, and absenteeism (Kahn & Byosiere, 1992). However, in contrast to burnout and health complaints, absenteeism, while detrimental to the organization, is not necessarily harmful to those employees who are absent from work. Quite the contrary, their absence may be instrumental for recuperating from experienced job stress. In the current study, we use the Job Demands–Resources model (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001) to examine how different categories of work characteristics influence future absenteeism among Dutch production workers, through their relationships with burnout and organizational commitment.

Generally, two different absence measures are distinguished: absence frequency and duration (Hensing, Alexanderson, Alleback, & Bjurulf, 1998). Absence frequency is the number of spells or times an individual has been absent during a particular period, regardless of the length of each of those spells. Usually, absence frequency is considered to be an indicator of “voluntary absenteeism” and a function of employees’ motivation. In contrast, absence duration is the total length of time an individual has been absent over a specified period regardless of the number of absence spells. Absence duration is generally considered to be an indicator of “involuntary absenteeism” that results from the inability rather than the unwillingness to come to work, for example as a result of ill health. The correlation between absence frequency and duration ranges between a low −.05 and a moderately high .60 (see Farrell & Stamm, 1988).

Since absenteeism includes different components (i.e., frequency and duration), there seem to exist different processes that lead to frequent or long absenteeism (Kohler & Mathieu, 1993). Indeed, most empirical studies that focus on individual experiences at work as precursors of absenteeism can be classified along two main explanations for employees’ decision to report themselves sick (Johns, 1997). First, employees may be absent because they want to withdraw from aversive work circumstances. Using a general ‘withdrawal’ hypothesis, it has been found that employees who are low in job satisfaction and organizational commitment are more frequently absent than those high in job satisfaction and commitment (e.g., Cohen, 1991; Farrell & Stamm, 1988; Mathieu & Kohler, 1990; Sagie, 1998). In these studies, absenteeism is usually interpreted as an escape from, compensation for, or even protest against aversive or demoralizing work circumstances (cf. Chadwick-Jones, Nicholson, & Brown, 1982). This agrees with the notion of voluntary absenteeism.

A second explanation for absenteeism is that absence behavior is a reaction to job stress, where stress is conceived as a failure to cope with job demands. This explanation stipulates that absenteeism may be used as a coping mechanism to deal with job strain and that it is not simply a behavioral reaction to dissatisfaction (Johns, 1997). Several stressors (i.e., job related factors thought to cause negative psychological reactions like tension, anxiety, and fatigue) such as workload (Dwyer & Ganster, 1991), monotony (Melamed, Ben-Avi, Luz, & Green, 1995), and role problems (Jamal, 1984) have indeed been associated with higher absence rates. However, Johns (1997) has observed that while various studies have reported relationships between stressors and absenteeism, tests of mediation models (stressor → stress reactions → absence), including the mediating role of stress reactions, are rare.

Meyer and Allen (1991) consider commitment as a multidimensional concept including three components: affective, normative and continuance commitment. Affective commitment refers to employees’ emotional attachment to, identification with and involvement in the organization, whereas normative commitment refers to employees’ attachment to the organization and to its goals because of ideology or felt obligation. Finally, continuance commitment refers to a general awareness of the costs of leaving the organization or to the perceived number of employment alternatives and degree of sacrifice.

Most absenteeism studies have examined the correlates of affective and continuance commitment (Gellatly, 1995). Affective commitment, that is expected to increase when work experiences are personally rewarding, has consistently been found to relate negatively to absenteeism (see Johns, 1997, for a review). In contrast, continuance commitment is expected to encourage absence behavior. As Brehm (1966) noted, feeling ‘locked in’ might provoke reactance expressed in short episodes of escape. This positive relationship between continuance commitment and absenteeism (frequency) has indeed been confirmed in some studies (e.g., Gellatly, 1995), although other studies found no relationship (e.g., Allen & Meyer, 1990; Somers, 1995). Normative commitment is expected to stimulate attendance due to the feeling of obligation. However, there is hardly any empirical support for the relationship between normative commitment and absenteeism (Gellatly, 1995).

Following the withdrawal paradigm, people will be more likely to withdraw from organizations to which they lack commitment. Indeed, Farrell and Stamm (1988) found a corrected mean correlation of −.12 between commitment and absence duration in their meta-analysis including 11 samples. Interestingly, they found a higher corrected mean correlation (−.23) when they restricted themselves to the six samples that measured absence frequency, which agrees with our previous reasoning that absence frequency primarily reflects voluntary absence. Furthermore, Cohen (1991) reports a corrected mean correlation of −.11 between commitment and absence on the basis of 11 studies. Thus, in general, the relationship between organizational commitment and absenteeism is rather low with absence frequency being more strongly related than absence duration.

Burnout can be defined in general terms as a syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism and reduced professional efficacy (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). Whereas emotional exhaustion and cynicism (or depersonalization) have been considered as the core dimensions of burnout, feelings of reduced efficacy seem to play a different role. For instance, reduced efficacy may also be interpreted as a possible consequence of burnout (Koeske & Koeske, 1989; Shirom, 1989). Furthermore, there is accumulating evidence that personal accomplishment largely develops in parallel with the two other burnout dimensions (Lee & Ashforth, 1996; Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998). These findings support the notion that emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (or cynicism) constitute a syndrome, which is loosely related to professional efficacy. Therefore, professional efficacy is excluded from our research model.

Absenteeism is generally considered as an important consequence of burnout at the organizational level. However, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced efficacy explain on average not more than 2% of the variance in absenteeism (e.g., Lawson & O’Brien, 1994; Price & Spence, 1994). After reviewing the literature, Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998) conclude therefore that: “… despite the popular assumption that burnout causes absenteeism, the effect is rather small and is most related to emotional exhaustion” (p. 91). Indeed, several meta-analytic studies on absenteeism show that work-related stress is but one of many variables accounting for employee absence behavior, so we should not expect job stress and absenteeism to be strongly correlated (Beehr, 1995; Nicholson, 1993). Non-work variables accounting for absenteeism include a wide range of factors, such as personal characteristics, sport injuries, smoking, alcohol consumption, psychological disorders, and physical pain (see Johns, 1997; Youngblood, 1984). These non-work variables may also interact with work-related variables, and show complex relationships with absenteeism. For example, in their study among 211 employed, married parents, Erickson, Nichols, and Ritter (2000) found that family demands moderated the effect of job burnout on absence frequency. Experiencing a high level of burnout was associated with increased absenteeism if employees had children under 6 living at home, or reported having difficulty with their child care arrangements.

At the heart of the Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model (Demerouti et al., 2001) lies the assumption that whereas employees in different organizations may be confronted with different working environments, the characteristics of these environments can be always classified in two general categories—job demands and job resources—thus constituting an overarching model that may be applied to various occupational settings, irrespective of the particular demands and resources involved. Job demands refer to those physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that require sustained physical and/or psychological (cognitive and emotional) effort and are therefore associated with certain physiological and/or psychological costs. Examples are a high work pressure, role overload, poor environmental conditions and problems related to reorganization. Job resources refer to those physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that are either/or: (1) functional in achieving work goals; (2) reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological costs; (3) stimulate personal growth and development. Resources may be located at the level of the organization at large (e.g., pay, career opportunities, job security), at the interpersonal level (e.g., supervisor and co-worker support, team climate), at the level of the organization of work (e.g., role clarity, participation in decision-making), and at the task level (e.g., performance feedback, skill variety, task significance, task identity, autonomy; see also Hackman & Oldham, 1976).

A second proposition in the JD–R model is that work characteristics may evoke two different processes. First, high job demands (i.e., work overload) may exhaust employees’ mental and physical resources and may therefore lead to health problems or burnout (e.g., Demerouti et al., 2000, Demerouti et al., 2001; Lee & Ashforth, 1996; Leiter, 1993). Second, poor or lacking job resources preclude actual goal accomplishment, which is likely to cause failure and frustration. In its turn this may lead to withdrawal from work, and reduced motivation or commitment. When the external environment lacks resources, individuals cannot reduce the potentially negative influence of high job demands and they cannot achieve their work goals. In such a situation, reducing commitment can be an important self-protection mechanism that may prevent the future frustration of not obtaining work-related goals (cf. Antonovski, 1987; Hackman and Oldham, 1976, Hackman and Oldham, 1980).

This study uses the JD–R model to examine how job demands and job resources influence absence duration and frequency among Dutch production employees, through their relationship with burnout and organizational commitment. On the basis of this model, we hypothesize that the work environment influences employees’ absence behavior in two different ways. First, we expect that demanding aspects of work (e.g., extreme job demands) lead to impaired health (i.e., burnout). Therefore, and in accordance with the ‘stress’ explanation for absenteeism, we predict that job demands (and not job resources) will have a positive impact on absence duration, through the experience of burnout (Hypothesis 1). In other words, we expect that burnout will play a mediating role in the relationship between job demands and total number of days absent, being an indicator of strain-related absence from work.

Second, we expect that job resources facilitate actual goal accomplishment (including dealing with demands), which provokes feelings of success, which further enhance organizational commitment. Therefore, and in line with the ‘withdrawal’ explanation for absenteeism, we predict that job resources (and not job demands) will have a negative effect on absence frequency, through their (positive) influence on organizational commitment (Hypothesis 2). Thus, we expect that commitment will play a mediating role in the relationship between job resources and absence frequency, being an indicator of voluntary absence from work. Both hypotheses are graphically depicted in Fig. 1. Finally, the two absence measures were assumed to influence each other, since the frequency measure may also include absence due to involuntary factors such as illness, and the duration measure may also include voluntary, or avoidable, absence (cf. Thomson, Griffiths, & Davison, 2000).