Absenteeism Essay

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INTRODUCTION Absenteeism has been considered as a serious problem and an expensive occurrence for both employees and employers seemingly unpredictable in nature. The consequences of absenteeism are widespread and consist of both direct and indirect effects on production and achievement of organizational objective (Johns and Nicholson, 1982; Gellatly, 1995; Singh and Khanna, 2011). Thus, absenteeism continues to attract researcher’s as well as organization’s attention (Steel, 2003). Absenteeism referred to employees’ withdrawal from work for some period of time. Labour bureau of Shimla, India defined absenteeism as the total man shifts lost because of absence as percentage of total number of man shifts scheduled to work. Another definition proposed in Webster dictionary stated that “Absenteeism is the practice or habit of being an absentee where an absentee is one who habitually stays away from work”. Absenteeism can also be summarised as “any failure of an employee to report to or to remain at work as scheduled, regardless of the reason” (Cascio, 2033; p.45). The reports affirm that on an average employees were absent for about 10% of the work days in approximately all the organizations per year (Annual Survey of Industries 2009 - 2010). The loss in work days due to absenteeism cost from $8.5 billion to over $20 billion per year (Steers and Rhodes.1978). In India, average absenteeism rate per year ranges from 8 to 13 per cent including absenteeism rate of 13 per cent in manufacturing industry (Annual SURVEY OF Industries 2009-10). This leads to loss of INR 70,000 to 80,000 million per year (http://www.assocham.org/prels/shownews-archive.php?id=247). Therefore, it is crucial to understand and identify the impact of different factors on employee absenteeism. Employee’s decision of withdrawal of work for some period of time depends on socio-economic factors, namely,
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