Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 33, Issue 2, March–April 2005, Pages 165-175
Journal of Criminal Justice

Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day: Antecedents of correctional absenteeism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2004.12.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Correctional agencies are labor intensive, and many of the posts in a prison cannot be vacated, often leading to mandatory overtime. Despite the high costs and inconvenience associated with absenteeism in prisons, little empirical work was conducted on the antecedents of sick leave use by correctional workers. From self-reported data of workers in federal prisons in 1994, the results of this study indicated that decisions to use sick leave were independent of the culture of the prisons, and that many of the variables found to be associated with sick leave use in other settings also applied to correctional settings. In particular, the authors found that job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job stress, and personal characteristics were associated with the use of sick leave. Surprisingly, tobacco use was not.

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.

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