Interest in presenteeism, attending work while ill, has flourished in light of its consequences for individual well-being and organizational productivity. Our goal was to identify its most significant causes and correlates by quantitatively summarizing the extant research. Additionally, we built an empirical model of some key correlates and compared the etiology of presenteeism versus absenteeism. We used meta-analysis (in total, K = 109 samples, N = 175,965) to investigate the correlates of presenteeism and meta-analytic structural equation modeling to test the empirical model. Salient correlates of working while ill included general ill health, constraints on absenteeism (e.g., strict absence policies, job insecurity), elevated job demands and felt stress, lack of job and personal resources (e.g., low support and low optimism), negative relational experiences (e.g., perceived discrimination), and positive attitudes (satisfaction, engagement, and commitment). Moreover, our dual process model clarified how job demands and job and personal resources elicit presenteeism via both health impairment and motivational paths, and they explained more variation in presenteeism than absenteeism. The study sheds light on the controversial act of presenteeism, uncovering both positive and negative underlying mechanisms. The greater variance explained in presenteeism as opposed to absenteeism underlines the opportunities for researchers to meaningfully investigate the behavior and for organizations to manage it. (PsycINFO Database Record

A debate has arisen out of the need to understand true intervention outcomes in the social sciences. Traditionally, the randomized, controlled trial that answers the question of ‘what works’ has been considered the gold standard. Although randomized, controlled trials have been favoured in organizational intervention research, there has been an increasing interest in understanding the influence of context and intervention processes on the outcomes of such interventions. In the present critical essay, we question the suitability of trials and meta-analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of organizational interventions and we suggest that realist evaluation that seeks to answer the questions of what works for whom in which circumstances may present a more suitable framework. We argue that examining the content and process mechanisms through which organizational interventions are effective, and the conditions under which these are triggered, will enable us to better understand how interventions achieve the desired outcomes of improved employee health and well-being. We suggest that organizational intervention content and process mechanisms may help bring about the desired outcomes of improved employee health and well-being and that contextual factors determine whether these mechanisms are triggered.

Because of a variety of access limitations, self-reported absenteeism from work is often employed in research concerning health, organizational behavior, and economics, and it is ubiquitous in large scale population surveys in these domains. Several well established cognitive and social-motivational biases suggest that self-reports of absence will exhibit convergent validity with records-based measures but that people will tend to underreport the behavior. We used meta-analysis to summarize the reliability, validity, and accuracy of absence self-reports. The results suggested that self-reports of absenteeism offer adequate test-retest reliability and that they exhibit reasonably good rank order convergence with organizational records. However, people have a decided tendency to underreport their absenteeism, although such underreporting has decreased over time. Also, self-reports were more accurate when sickness absence rather than absence for any reason was probed. It is concluded that self-reported absenteeism might serve as a valid measure in some correlational research designs. However, when accurate knowledge of absolute absenteeism levels is essential, the tendency to underreport could result in flawed policy decisions.

Giving the crucial role of organizational context in shaping individual attitudes and behaviors at work, in this research we studied the effects of collective work-unit perceptions of social context on individual work resilience and two key individual outcomes: job satisfaction and job performance as rated by the supervisor. We theorized that collective perceptions of social context act as antecedents of individual variables, and that individual job satisfaction mediates the relationship between collective perceptions of social context and job performance, and between work resilience and job performance over time. A sample of 305 white-collar employees, clustered in 67 work-units, participated in the study. Hierarchical linear modeling highlighted that collective perceptions of social context are significant related to individual work resilience. Moreover, results showed that individual job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between collective perceptions of social context and individual job performance and the relationship between individual work resilience and individual job performance. At a practical level, results suggest that interventions on collective perceptions of social context may increase work resilience, job satisfaction and job performance over time at the individual level.

This investigation intends to uncover the mechanisms linking self-efficacy to job performance by analyzing the mediating role of job crafting. A two-wave study on 465 white-collar workers was conducted, matching participants’ self-report data (i.e., self-efficacy and job crafting) with supervisory performance ratings. The structural equation model showed a positive reciprocal relationship between self-efficacy and crafting behaviors. In turn, job crafting predicted performance positively over time. More importantly, results confirmed the mediating role of crafting actions, which may represent the behavioral process underlying the positive effect of self-efficacy on individual outcomes. Practical implications for organizations, such as encouraging bottom-up job design or designing job-crafting interventions, and future research directions are also offered.

We examined whether a supervisor's coaching leadership style predicts the perception of organizational politics in performance appraisal (OPPA) reported by the collaborators. Additionally, we drew on social cognition and motivational life-span development theories to hypothesize age-related differences in perceived OPPA and its link with the coaching leadership style. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) on a sample of 576 employees and 112 leaders, we found that coaching leaders are perceived as less manipulative in their performance ratings, especially by older employees. This article includes a discussion of the implications these results have for performance management of an age-diverse workforce.