Consequences of Absenteeism

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the consequences of absenteeism. Instead of asking what causes absenteeism, we want to identify the causal effects of absenteeism: that is, what effect does absenteeism have on the individual worker, adjacent workers, the work group, the organization, other social organization, and society? Our goal is to provide a better theoretical understanding of these questions. The literature in this area is quite sparse. While there are probably thousands of studies examining the determinants of absenteeism, there are probably less than twenty studies that directly examine the effects of absenteeism on other criteria such as productivity, safety, and so on. Therefore, our focus in this chapter is more on understanding the theoretical issues underlying this question rather than on making sense of a robust literature.