Employee Absence: An Organizational Perspective

Jacob Kjær Eskildsen (), Anders Frederiksen () and Ann-Kristina Løkke ()
Additional contact information
Jacob Kjær Eskildsen: Aarhus University
Ann-Kristina Løkke: Aarhus University

No 11889, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study employee absence in Danish organizations. In contrast to Steers and Rhodes (1978), who stress the importance of individual and organizational characteristics in shaping employees' motivation to attend work, we show that absence is predominantly an individualized phenomenon. Because the within-group variation in absence clearly dominates the between-group variation in absence, we argue that companies need to invoke individualized policies to reduce employee absence and demonstrate that HR Analytics is a useful tool in the process; policies targeting particular employee groups such as women or senior workers are inefficient. An additional intriguing finding is that incentives (through promotions and dismissals) are linked to individual absence.

Keywords: personnel management; absence; absenteeism; HR Analytics; person-effects; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M12 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published as 'Employee Absence in Public and Private Organizations' in: Applied Economics, 2021, 53 (21), 2416-2432

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11889.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11889

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().