Social Interaction at the Workplace: Exploring Sickness Absence Behaviour
Sickness absence levels vary across industries, organizations, and intra-organizational units. Despite its obvious relation to health, it has behavioral and social aspects, typically focused by social scientists.
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There is ample evidence that workers do react to the economic incentives in sickness insurance programs (1, 2, 3), even though incentives do not necessarily explain observed fluctuations in absence rates (4). Still, different individuals respond differently to the same incentives. E.g., a majority of Norwegian workers do not fully exploit their yearly self-certification quotas in sickness absence, potentially an example of stigma costs, (5, 6).
Concepts such as absence culture and absence norms emphasize that circumstances outside the individual may explain variation in absence levels (7). Absence culture may originate from “negotiations” between workers and management, or between workers, where high absence levels may be regarded as a reaction to unfavourable working conditions, and vice versa (reciprocity). Absence culture may also originate from negotiations between work colleagues (8).
The basic assumption is that individuals compare themselves to others in their locality, developing a common understanding of what is an accepted level of absenteeism. The literature on absence culture is still scarce, and reliance on individual determinants comprises a risk of underestimating the effects of collective norms.
A few recent contributions show the salience of group norms in explaining absenteeism, e.g. (9, 10). Recent research also finds social interaction effects in Norwegian disability insurance by studying geographical neighborhoods (11).
The extent to which sickness absence is contagious and the possible existence of absence cultures IS investigated by studying teachers that move between schools, cf. (9): if teachers who move tend to adjust their absenteeism to the absence norm at their new school, this indicates – after controlling for individual and workplace factors – that contamination is a part of the absence behaviour. The longitudinal character of the KS data allows identification of teachers who move between schools and also facilitates controls for unobserved effects at the individual and organizational level.