Injury-related absenteeism and job satisfaction: insights from Greek and UK data

Abstract

Most of the literature on absenteeism suggest that absence from work is a complex issue influenced by multiple causes, both of personal and of organizational nature. Job satisfaction has also been identified as one of the factors affecting an employee's motivation to work attendance. There is no universal agreement concerning the relationship between absenteeism and job satisfaction. Some research have found no correlation between these two variables, whereas other studies indicate a weak relationship between these two variables. It has also been suggested that absence and job satisfaction might be more strongly related under some conditions, for instance in the case of blue-collar workers. There is a lack of attention in the literature, however, to injury-related absenteeism, which is a particular type of absenteeism. This paper attempts to fill this gap and examines the effect of job satisfaction on injury-related absenteeism by using Greek and UK data. The empirical results suggest that there is a negative relationship between injury-related absenteeism and job satisfaction. The paper also discusses possible policy measures towards reducing injury-related absenteeism.

Measuring teacher job satisfaction: Assessing invariance in the Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale (TJSS) across six countries

“…In addition, job satisfaction is positively associated with work-related characteristics such as administration control, teaching competence and organizational culture ( Ma & MacMillan, 1999 ). Conversely, employees’ job satisfaction is inversely associated with general ( Hanebuth, 2008 ) and injury-related absenteeism ( Drakopoulos & Grimani, 2013 ), intention to leave the workplace ( MacIntosh & Doherty, 2010 ; Tschopp, Grote, & Gerber, 2014 ), counterproductive interpersonal and organizational behaviors ( Mount, Ilies, & Johnson, 2006 ), job-related stress ( Boudreaux, Mandry, & Brantley, 1997 ), psychological distress ( Moen, Kelly, & Lam, 2013 ) and biological markers of ill-health (such as higher levels of inflammatory cytokines and other lymphocytes; Amati et al, 2010 ). Such negative effects on the teaching professions are crucial since, for instance, job related stress is negatively related with students’ academic achievement ( Banerjee & Lamb, 2016 ; Kalyva, 2013 ).…”

Does civil servant teachers’ job satisfaction influence their absenteeism?

“…Congruent with the above studies, Drakopoulos and Grimani [25], [26] who previously conducted a similar research to market laborers, reported that there is a weak negative relationship of job satisfaction and absenteeism. They predicated the two variables might have a stronger relation under particular condition.…”

Pay Level Comparisons in Job Satisfaction Research and Mainstream Economic Methodology

“…Job satisfaction research was also deemed to be important for analysing and predicting many key economic variables such as: labour turnover, labour productivity, pay differentials, workers' absenteeism, quits, the role of gender and the degree of unionism in the labour market (e.g. Borjas, 1979;Clark, 1997;Clark, 2001;Hamermesh, 2001;Shields and Price, 2002;Böckerman and Ilmakunnas, 2008;Card, Mas, Moretti and Saez, 2012;Drakopoulos and Grimani, 2013). Finally and considering the recent boom of the related field of happiness research, job satisfaction is viewed as an important predictor of overall well-being (Clark and Oswald, 1996;Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza, 2000; Bonsang and Van Soest, 2012).…”