Personality Factors and Sick Leave Days. Evidence from a Nationally Representative Longitudinal Study in Germany.

Abstract

Background: The question of whether employees’ sickness absence from the workplace depends on personality has been researched. Existing evidence mostly stems from cross-sectional studies, mainly showing that personality factors were not associated with the number of sick leave days, except for neuroticism, which was positively associated with sick leave days. Based on the above, it remains an under researched question whether intraindividual changes in personality factors are associated with changes in sick leave days. Thus, based on a nationally representative sample, the current study aimed to investigate the relationship between personality factors and sick leave days longitudinally based on a nationally representative sample of individuals in Germany. Methods: The present study used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), a longitudinal survey of private households in Germany. Information from the years 2005, 2009, 2013 were used. The Big Five Inventory-GSOEP (BFI-S) was used to measure personality. Sick leave days in the preceding year were recorded. Poisson fixed effects regressions were used. Results: Adjusting for potential confounders, regressions showed that increases in neuroticism were associated with increased sick leave days. The longitudinal association between extraversion and sick leave days was marginally significant (p < 0.10). Other personality factors were not significantly associated with sick leave days. In addition, sick leave days increased with worsening self-rated health, presence of severe disability and increasing age. Conclusions: The findings of the current study highlight the association between neuroticism and sick leave days longitudinally. Further research is required to elucidate the underlying mechanisms.

Big five personality traits and physician-certified sickness absence

“…The lack of any main effect of conscientiousness in our study was surprising, given earlier findings that conscientiousness is negatively related to work absence and the welldocumented health-and task-directed nature of conscientious individuals. Nevertheless, the other PERSONALITY AND SICKNESS ABSENCE 29 previous study on personality and register-based sickness absence also did not find an effect of conscientiousness (Blekesaune, 2012); neither did a study based on longitudinal survey data (Raynik et al, 2020). This could indicate that the potentially buffering effect of conscientiousness on work absence primarily appears for absenteeism and more short-term sick leave.…”

“…Vlasveld and colleagues (2013) found that openness negatively predicted long sickness absence spells (> 2 weeks; medium effect size), but not short spells. The other studies that have examined personality dimensions and sick leave did not find an association with openness (Blekesaune, 2012;Raynik et al, 2020;Störmer & Fahr, 2013). Due to the sparse research on openness, it remains uncertain how openness and sickness absence are related.…”

“…Two of these studies used data from a nationally representative German survey that included a 15-item version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). The first study used cross-sectional data to examine sickness absence incidence and duration (absences up to 30 days; Störmer & Fahr, 2013), and the second study used longitudinal data to examine sickness absence rates (Raynik et al, 2020). A third Dutch study applied cross-sectional survey data to test the association between personality as measured by the 60-item NEO-Five Factor Inventory and short-term (0-2 weeks) and longterm (> 2 weeks up to six months) sickness absence in a non-representative sample of individuals with psychopathology and healthy controls (Vlasveld et al, 2013).…”

Associations of employment sector and occupational exposures with full and part-time sickness absence: random and fixed effects analyses on panel data

“…Our novel results based on the comparison of the FE models with the RE models suggest that the typically observed associations of employment sector and occupational exposures with SA may to a large extent be explained by unobserved individual characteristics. Underlying personal factors, eg, certain personality traits appear to influence both selection into particular work environments (39)(40)(41)(42) and having a high likelihood of SA (28,29,43). In addition, work attitudes and values have been found to influence selection into particular employment sectors (44)(45)(46) and these factors may also be associated with the use of SA.…”

“…In addition to the potential causal mechanisms between work-related factors and SA, the associations may also be affected by selection, ie, individuals with characteristics associated with a high likelihood of fSA or pSA ending up in particular types of jobs. Most previous studies, however, have not been able to adequately control for such confounding, as many individual-level characteristics that are known to affect SA, eg, personality factors such as neuroticism ( 28 , 29 ), remain unobserved.…”