Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day: Antecedents of correctional absenteeism
Introduction
Governments expend immense resources to operate prisons, in part due to the explosive growth of corrections in recent decades. Correctional organizations affect large numbers of individuals, be it staff, families of staff, inmates, inmate family members, victims, or the general public. Research in corrections traditionally investigated issues like inmate subcultures, prison violence, legal interventions, recidivism, and inmate prison life. Issues focusing on correctional staff, however, were just as theoretically complex, interesting, and important (Duffee, 1980). There was an essential need to study the effects of work environment on the attitudes and behaviors of correctional staff. Most of the published research on correctional staff focused upon attitudes, particularly job satisfaction, and the vast majority of these studies looked at the antecedents of correctional staff job satisfaction (Lambert, Hogan, & Barton, 2002a). Research in other fields found that organizational commitment was another highly salient factor in explaining employee behaviors, one frequently ignored in correction staff research. The few studies that explored the potential causes of correctional staff behaviors mainly focused on turnover (Camp, 1994, Jurik & Winn, 1987). While turnover is detrimental to correctional organizations, absenteeism is another form of negative employee behavior.
Correctional facilities must manage employee attendance. If employees are frequently absent from work, the long-term productivity and health of any employing organization will suffer. While absenteeism is a disruptive and costly worker behavior, there were only a handful of published articles that explored correctional staff absenteeism. Empirical research into the potential antecedents and correlates of correctional staff absenteeism is necessary to be able to combat correctional staff absenteeism.
Section snippets
Defining absenteeism and its impact
Absenteeism occurs when employees who were scheduled for work do not attend, in terms of hours or days rather than minutes. There are many reasons why people do not attend work, such as illness, family emergency, or just to have a day off. Absenteeism has both direct and indirect costs for the organization. Direct costs include sick pay, fringe benefits that still must be paid, overtime to fill the position, and overstaffing (i.e., overstaffing is scheduling additional workers to fill in for
Literature review
Only a handful of studies examined the issue of correctional staff absenteeism. While stress was the major focus of the study, Gross, Larson, Urban, and Zupan (1994) found that Michigan female correctional officers used more sick leave as compared to their male counterparts. Among correctional officers at the Auburn facility in New York, Lombardo (1981) indicated that job dissatisfaction was related to absenteeism, but only briefly discussed the matter. Venne (1997) examined the impact of
Research question
There was a growing body of literature on absenteeism; however, little focused on correctional staff absenteeism. Research in the organizational sciences was largely conducted on private sector organizations, and the vast majority of public sector research excluded corrections, a critical omission. Correctional organizations are uniquely different from private and most other public organizations. Corrections agencies are not involved in processing or producing inanimate objects, or providing
Data source
The data were obtained from the 1994 Prison Social Climate Survey (PSCS) collected by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the last year that asked staff about their use of sick leave. Every year since 1988, the PSCS was administered to a representative segment of staff at each federal correctional facility, excluding regional and central office staff. The employees were selected through a random stratified proportional probability sample design. The sample was selected based upon a set of
Results
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics for the variables used in this analysis. The typical respondent indicated they had been absent 2.33 days during the six-month period preceding the administration of the survey. In addition, approximately three-fourths of the sample was male non-Hispanic Whites.
Missing data were handled with the imputation methods described by Schafer (1997) and implemented in the experimental SAS procedure PROC MI. The PROC MI procedure produced three separate data
Discussion
Most of the predicted relationships were supported by the results. Job satisfaction and organizational commitment had a significant negative impact on correctional staff absenteeism. The effects of both job satisfaction and agency commitment could best be explained by looking at the two major types of absenteeism, unavoidable and avoidable (also called voluntary and involuntary) (Rhodes & Steers, 1990). Unavoidable absences are due to triggering events that are uncontrollable by the employee,
Conclusion
Correctional staff need to report to scheduled work. The absent respondents in this study alone had direct costs of wages in the millions, not to mention the expenses of overtime and indirect costs. Therefore, reducing employee absenteeism is paramount for correctional agencies. While minimizing absenteeism is critical for most correctional organizations, very little research was conducted. It would appear that this area had largely been ignored by correctional researchers.
Based upon a review
Acknowledgements
The views expressed in this study represent those of the authors and not necessarily those of either the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the Department of Justice. The authors thank Janet Lambert for editing and proofreading the article. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
References (38)
Employee and job attributes as predictors of absenteeism in a national sample of workers: The importance of health and dangerous working conditions
Social Science and Medicine
(1991)- et al.
The measurement of organizational commitment
Journal of Vocational Behavior
(1979) - Alcohol Abuse. (2003). Effects of alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Retrieved June 13, 2003, from...
- American Cancer Society. (2003). Tobacco and cancer. Retrieved June 10, 2003, from...
- et al.
Conceptualizing how job involvement and organizational commitment effect turnover and absenteeism
Academy of Management Review
(1987) Beyond the Steers and Rhodes model of employee attendance
Academy of Management Review
(1986)- et al.
The determinants of employee absenteeism: An empirical test of a causal model
Journal of Occupational Psychology
(1989) Assessing the effects of organizational commitment and job satisfaction on turnover: An event history approach
The Prison Journal
(1994)Correctional management: Change and control in correctional organizations
(1980)
Impact of overweight on the risk of developing common chronic diseases during a 10-year period
Archives of Internal Medicine
Gender differences in occupational stress among correctional officers
American Journal of Criminal Justice
Surviving “the joint”: Mitigating factors of correctional officer stress
Journal of Crime and Justice
Correctional officers as human service workers: The effect of job satisfaction
Justice Quarterly
How often were you absent? A review of the use of self-reported absence data
Journal of Applied Psychology
Describing correctional security dropouts and rejects: An individual or organizational profile?
Criminal Justice and Behavior
Missed work and lost hours, May 1985
Monthly Labor
Is it the flu or are you faking it?
American Demographics
Absent correctional staff: A discussion of the issue and recommendations for future research
American Journal of Criminal Justice
Cited by (126)
Testing the job demands-resources model for Indian correctional staff job satisfaction
2023, International Journal of Law, Crime and JusticeCitation Excerpt :Being worried likely makes the job more difficult and, in turn, decreases the level of job satisfaction. Among U.S. correctional staff, perceived dangerousness of the job was reported to be negatively related to job satisfaction (Blevins et al., 2006; Cheeseman et al., 2011; Cullen et al., 1985; Griffin, 2001; Hartley et al., 2013; Keena et al., 2020; Lambert and Hogan, 2010; Lambert et al., 2004, 2016; Lambert et al., 2005; Mahfood et al., 2013; Paoline and Lambert, 2012). Jiang et al. (2018) observed that perceived dangerousness of the job was inversely linked to job satisfaction among Chinese correctional officers.
Self-perceived Transformational Leadership Decreases Employee Sick Leave, but Context Matters
2023, Revista de Psicologia del Trabajo y de las OrganizacionesSpillover of domains: testing the influence of work-family conflict on staff at a Southern U.S. prison
2023, Psychology, Crime and Law