Neuroscience
You’re a company boss and you want to reduce illegitimate sickness leave among your employees. What do you do? Introduce schemes to increase job satisfaction among your staff? It sounds sensible – the problem is, time and again research has only found a weak link between measures of job satisfaction and employee sick leave. The same is true for measures of job involvement and organisational commitment. But now Jurgen Wegge and colleagues think they’ve found the reason for this. The key, they say, is looking at how these factors interact. Lack of involvement in one’s job only matters when it’s combined with low job satisfaction.
Wegge’s team administered questionnaires to 436 employees of a large German civil service organisation. On their own, neither job satisfaction (measured by agreement with statements like “In general I am satisfied with my job”), nor job involvement (measured by agreement with statements like “Most of my life goals have to do with my work”) was related to the amount of sick leave an employee had taken over the last year. However, low job satisfaction and low job involvement combined were strongly related to the amount of sick leave taken.
The researchers said their finding has practical implications. “…it can be argued that establishing high job satisfaction (e.g. by job-redesign strategies, promotions, increases of salary) among employees will pay off as this prevents the transformation of low job involvement into high absenteeism”.
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Wegge, J., Schmidt, K-H., Parkes, C. & van Dick, R. (2006). ‘Taking a sickie’: Job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organisation. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, In Press. DOI: 10.1348/096317906X99371.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Understanding why people take 'sickies'
You’re a company boss and you want to reduce illegitimate sickness leave among your employees. What do you do? Introduce schemes to increase job satisfaction among your staff? It sounds sensible – the problem is, time and again research has only found a weak link between measures of job satisfaction and employee sick leave. The same is true for measures of job involvement and organisational commitment. But now Jurgen Wegge and colleagues think they’ve found the reason for this. The key, they say, is looking at how these factors interact. Lack of involvement in one’s job only matters when it’s combined with low job satisfaction.Wegge’s team administered questionnaires to 436 employees of a large German civil service organisation. On their own, neither job satisfaction (measured by agreement with statements like “In general I am satisfied with my job”), nor job involvement (measured by agreement with statements like “Most of my life goals have to do with my work”) was related to the amount of sick leave an employee had taken over the last year. However, low job satisfaction and low job involvement combined were strongly related to the amount of sick leave taken.
The researchers said their finding has practical implications. “…it can be argued that establishing high job satisfaction (e.g. by job-redesign strategies, promotions, increases of salary) among employees will pay off as this prevents the transformation of low job involvement into high absenteeism”.
__________________________________
Wegge, J., Schmidt, K-H., Parkes, C. & van Dick, R. (2006). ‘Taking a sickie’: Job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organisation. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, In Press. DOI: 10.1348/096317906X99371.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Employees Should Be Taught Political Skills
Psychologists in America have called on organisations to train their staff in political skills. Vickie Gallagher and Mary Laird made their recommendation after reporting evidence that the job satisfaction of staff with low political skill suffers when...
- Volunteer Staff Are Surprisingly Committed
Despite the obvious value of volunteers, managers often have reservations about hiring unpaid staff because of doubts over their commitment. There's a sense that they can leave at any time and there's no paid contract to keep them in line. But...
- A Misogynistic Workplace Is Bad For Male Employees Too
Witnessing the harassment or uncivil treatment of women at work is bad not only for female employees, but for the productivity of the whole organisation. That’s according to Kathi Miner-Rubino and Lilia Cortina in America, who surveyed 871 female and...
- When A Good Leader Is A Bad Thing
For organisations that have an excellent customer service ethos, strong team leaders can actually have a detrimental effect. That's the paradoxical finding of Harry Hui and colleagues who investigated 511 employees comprising 55 teams at a range of...
- Judging Your Worth
How happy we are with our salary depends on how much we think other people earn. More specifically, Paul Sweeney and Dean McFarlin (University of Daytona) predicted, it is how much we think people similar to us earn - others with the same job, or who...