Selected Factors Affecting Employees' Sick Leave Use
Journal article by Hazel L. Kroesser, Richard F. Meckley, James T. Ranson; Public Personnel Management, Vol. 20, 1991
Journal Article Excerpt
Selected factors affecting employees' sick leave use. by Hazel L. Kroesser , Richard F. Meckley , James T. Ranson The purpose of this study was to investigate sick leave use in the West Virginia Department of Education. Salary, gender, number of supervisors, job autonomy, job classification and stress were the factors chosen to relate to sick leave use. Salary, gender, number of supervisors and job autonomy were found to be related statistically to sick leave use. This study has implications for policy development pertaining to sick leave. Several explanations are offered for the findings. Some employees use every day of sick leave they accrue while other employees never take sick leave. A better understanding of the dynamics resulting in the greater use of sick leave would allow managers to run organizations more efficiently. This efficiency should lead to more effective projections of sick leave use, and as a result, managers could plan their budgets and staffing patterns more realistically. Several ways are available to assess the impact of employee absenteeism on organizations. Kopelman, Schneller and Silver (1981) described five ways sick leave use affected organizations. First, there were direct expenses such as covering for the absent employee by paying others overtime, hiring temporary staff or overstaffing. Second, there were fringe benefit expenses which absent workers still accrued during their absence. Third, there were the costs of maintaining an absence control system such as accounting procedures for sick leave use. Fourth, absenteeism meant an increase in supervisory time spent in adjusting to absent workers or in managing the absenteeism policy. Fifth, there were indirect costs of lower morale among workers who resented doing someone else's work or who were concerned about the legitimacy of others' absences. Kuzmits (1980) would add the cost of reduced productivity due to lost workdays to the list proposed by Kopelman et. al. The fiscal impact of sick leave use is significant. For example, during the 1982-83 fiscal year, the cost of providing substitute professional and service personnel in West Virginia County School Systems was $13,382,423 (West Virginia Department of Education Annual Report, volume III, 1982-83). Nationally it is estimated that each year over 400 million work days are lost because of employee absenteeism. This number of days translates into an estimate of $66 per employee per day or more than $20 billion per year (Kuzmits, 1980). If an employee is sick, it makes sense for him or her to stay home from work and recover from the illness. However, purposes other than illness are often the real reason for the use of sick leave (Herzberg, Mausner, Peterson and Capwell, 1957). Knowing these masons may enable administrators to develop cost effective methods for reducing sick leave use and increase employee morale and productivity in the process. Methodology Salary, gender, and seniority under three job conditions were the independent variables of the study. The number of supervisors or persons delegating work assignments, job autonomy, and perceived job stress were the three job conditions. Data Sources Subjects for the study were all full-time employees of the West Virginia Department of Education for the entire 1984-85 fiscal year. The Department expenditure schedule, sick leave records, and the Job Analysis Questionnaire (JAQ) were the data sources for the study. The/ob Analysis Questionnaire (JAQ) asks questions about the number of years of seniority in the employees' current classification, and the number of years as an employee of the State of West Virginia. The JAQ also asks respondents about the number of persons who supervised or delegated work to them. To determine job autonomy a three point scale was used for each of the following questions: (1) "Do you have any responsibility for deciding what procedures, guides, law, policies, rules, etc. are to be followed in your work or the work of others?" The response choices were: "not usually," "sometimes," and "regularly." Employees could also check a box labeled "please explain" and provide a narrative response. The narrative responses were not compiled for this study. Perceived job stress comprised the final section of the JAQ, and it has two measures. The first measure is a response to the questions, "Do you consider your job stressful?" to which the response choices are "no," "sometimes," or "frequently." The second measure requires a respondent to place a check mark at any point along a continuum with five equidistant sections marked "none," "mildly stressfuL" "moderately stressfuL" "very stressful," and "extremely stressful" to indicate perceptions of how stressful their job is.Salary and gender data were obtained for ... |
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