Informal Networks and Absenteeism Within an Organization

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Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory KL578-03-Sander-2 April 21, 1998 15:29

Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory 4:2 (1998): 149–163c© 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands

Informal Networks and Absenteeism Withinan Organization

KARIN SANDERSDepartment of Sociology/ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG Groningen,The Netherlandsemail: [email protected]

SIGRID K. HOEKSTRARijksgebouwen Dienst Directie Noord (Government Buildings Agency), Cascadeplein 10, 9726 AD Groningen,The Netherlands

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the informal ties of the employees within an organization andtheir absentee rates. To explain this relationship, the assumption is made that within a department, a more or lessstable norm concerning illegal absenteeism exits, and that the strength of this norm is related to the tightness ofthe informal relationships between the employees: the more consensus on the absentee norm, irrespective of thedegree of tolerance, the more cohesive this department. Furthermore, according to the fairness theory of Adams(1965), a relationship between the tightness of the informal relations, the norm concerning illegal absenteeism andthe absentee rate is expected: the more cohesive, the higher the effect of the group norm on the short-term absenteerate. Network data of 62 employees of eight comparable teams within a housing corporation were collected bymeans of a questionnaire, and combined with data on the absentee rates of the employees. The data supported thehypotheses concerning the relationship between the group norm, the tightness of the informal relations and theshort-term absentee rates of the employees within a department.

Keywords: informal organization, informal group norms, illegal absenteeism

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holdsdual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Althoughwe all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at leastfor a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag

Introduction

Research shows that absenteeism of employees within an organization is influenced bymany factors (Smulders 1984a, 1984b): in a meta-analysis of 318 studies, it was found that32 factors effect the absentee rates of employees. In addition to demographic factors, suchas age, education (Philipsen 1969; Grosfeld 1988) and sex (see for a review Cuelenaereet al. 1996), qualities of the job, such as characteristics of the task, responsibility, autonomy,

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150 SANDERS AND HOEKSTRA

task variation, working conditions, salary, promotion opportunities, working hours, andeven economic factors such as reorganization (Prins 1990; Withag et al. 1990) and im-minent bankruptcy (Smulders and Bloemhoff 1993), influence the absenteeism within anorganization.

In the integration model of Veerman (1993), also known as the ‘absenteeism-model’ (Smit1997), most of these factors are summarized, and interrelations of the factors are given byexamining the whole path of absenteeism from becoming ill to resuming work. The startingpoint of this integration model is the relation between the coping capacities and the burdencapabilities of an individual. A distorted balance in the relation between these coping ca-pacities and burden capabilities—consists of the job being either too heavy or too light foran employee—may lead to a tendency to absenteeism. Following the model of Veerman(1993), the height of the ‘absenteeism threshold’ will determine whether a person with atendency to absenteeism reports himself ill. After this event, the ‘continuation threshold’ de-termines if and when a sick employee resumes work. Apart from this, the integration modelincorporates organizational factors, such as the organizational culture and societal factors.

According to this integration model, the ‘absenteeism threshold’ is seen as an individ-ual threshold, which is for the most part dependent on the informal surroundings of theemployees, such as the social relations between employees and the informal norms on ab-senteeism (Veerman 1993). In a review article, Van Yperen et al. (1994) found evidencefor the relationship between group norms and the absenteeism: the more intolerant thisnorm, the lower the absenteeism. Results of research by Geurts et al. (1996) on bus driversin a large city in the Netherlands show that especially members of strong interdependentworking groups see leaving their colleagues alone as highly undesirable and will, becauseof this, avoid absenteeism. Research on the employees of DAF trucks in the Netherlands(Smit 1996, 1997) provides support for the presupposition that in addition to the informalgroup norm, the relationship between the employee and the supervisor will influence theabsentee rate; the more ‘human’ the style of the supervisor, the more he or she createsgood working conditions and the more the supervisor will have an eye for the informalrelationships between the employees and, because of this, the lower the absentee rate.

Given the above-mentioned research, the informal relationships between the employeeswithin an organization or department, the informal networks,1 seem to be especially impor-tant in the effect of the informal group norm concerning illegal absenteeism on the absenteerate. The relationship between informal group norm, informal network, and absenteeismhas not yet been examined; neither has the mechanism by which informal network andinformal group norms lead to a high or low absentee rate. Both are studied in this arti-cle. Research on informal networks related to the formal structure has been conductedrecently (e.g., Bulder et al. 1993; Buunk, 1990; Winnubst et al. 1982). However, researchon the influence of the informal relationships between the employees, the informal net-work, on the way employees function within an organization is scarce.2 In this article,we try to improve this situation by linking the informal networks and the informal groupsnorm to the absentee rate within an organization. The research problem addressed thisarticle is formulated as follows:What is the relationship between the informal ties of theemployees within an organization and their absentee rates? How can this relationship beexplained?

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INFORMAL NETWORKS AND ABSENTEEISM WITHIN AN ORGANIZATION 151

When speaking about absenteeism, a distinction is often made between white, grey, andblack absenteeism. In the case ofwhiteabsenteeism, it is quite obvious that an individualis ill; e.g., when he or she has high fever or a broken leg, it is clear that he or she can’t work(Allegro and Veerman 1990). Absenteeism is calledgrey if the illness is psychological orpsychosomatic, such as headache, stomachache or tiredness. In all these cases, diagnosesare hard to make. In the case ofblack absenteeism, someone who is not ill at all hasreported himself or herself sick. This black variant of absenteeism is mostly called illegalabsenteeism. In these cases, and in the case of grey absenteeism as well, a degree of freedomto absenteeism exists (Philipsen 1969).

Due to this degree of freedom, the choice of individuals can be modelled. The questionthen is why employees within an organization differ in their choices to report themselvesill, and to what degree and in what way this choice is related both to the informal structureand to the informal group norm on illegal absenteeism. By and large, researchers agree thatfrequent, short-term absenteeism is the most valid indicator of grey and black absenteeism.Especially the fact that frequent, short-term absenteeism is very hard to predict in timecauses problems of coordination and problems of diversion of work for organizations (VanYperen et al. 1994).

A number of researchers have indicated the importance of doing research in only oneorganization when studying informal group norms, because then all possible intermediaryfactors are controlled for (e.g., Chadwick-Jones et al. 1982). That is why the relationshipsbetween informal network, informal group norm and absentee rates are examined in thepresent study in different departments within the same organization. The advantage of thisdesign is that most organizational characteristics are controlled for.

The structure of this article is as follows. In the second section, the relationship betweeninformal ties, informal group norm, and the (short-term) absentee rate of a department istheoretically elaborated, and hypotheses are formulated. The methodology used in thisresearch is described in the third section, and the results are presented in section four. Atthe end of this article, conclusions and a number of remarks are made (Section 5).

Theoretical Elaboration

On the basis of the exchange theory proposed by Adams (1965), also known as thefairnesstheory, the informal group norm of a team or a department can be seen as important inchoosing to report ill for a few days. According to this fairness theory, individuals comparethe ratio between their investments and returns to the ratio of the investments and returnsof the relevant others on the basis of this informal group norm. In the case of a distortedbalance between costs and benefits, the assumption can be made that individuals will actto restore this balance. In this article, the assumption is made that one way a distortion canbe restored is by means of reporting ill without actually being ill.

First, the effects of the strength and the direction of the informal group norm onabsenteeism—i.e., how tolerant is an individual to playing truant for a day—and the in-formal relations between employees of the same department will be discussed. Then, therelationship between the informal network, informal group norm and the absentee rate willbe discussed.

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Informal Relations. In order to elaborate the informal group norm, the assumption isformulated that every employee within the organization possesses a more or less stableopinion on (short-term) absenteeism, which we will call the opinion on illegal absenteeism.Besides, the assumption is made that the consensus between the employees of a departmentor a team on these opinions (in terms of the fairness theory of Adams (1965): the relevantothers) is related to the relative number of informal ties between the employees within adepartment. In this assumption no attention is given to the degree of tolerance of a groupnorm, attention is only paid to the degree of consensus of the opinions. Because in thisarticle only cross-sectional data are used, no causality direction between consensus inopinions and close relationships—consensus in opinions influence close relationships orclose relationships influence opinions—is hypothesized.

Furthermore, the expectation is formulated that within a highly cohesive department,that is a department with close relationships between the employees, the norm concerningillegal absenteeism will be stronger—i.e., the consensus in opinions concerning illegalabsenteeism is higher—than in a department where the degree of cohesion is low. Afterall, individuals within the same department or the same team who adhere to a deviant normabout illegal absenteeism distort the balance between investments and returns. This effectwill be stronger in cases where the work of the absent employee will be divided among theother employees of the department, meaning that they have to work harder. This means thatif the employees of a department agree on the norm on illegal absenteeism, irrespective ofthe degree of tolerance of this norm, the informal network between a department will betighter.

The chance that individuals have tight relationships if they share more important charac-teristics with each other is usually referred to as the ‘homophily’ principle (Rogers 1979).Besides characteristics such as age, social economic status, type of work and so on, commonvalues and norms are repeatedly mentioned as important characteristics that lead to strongties between two or more persons (Buunk 1990).

Accordingly, the first hypothesis can be formulated (ceteris paribus): the tightness of therelationships between employees within a department is positively related to the consensuson the norm concerning illegal absenteeism.

In addition, the physical distance is an important predictor of the tightness of a relationshipbetween persons (Festinger et al. 1950). This means that within an organization the chancesof a tight relationship between employees is higher if the physical distance is smaller. Inthis article, physical distance is considered as being close in meaning to the opportunityto interact, and the assumption is made that the physical distances between employeeswithin a department are smaller than the physical distances of employees between differentdepartments.

Short-term Absenteeism.Research shows that informal relationships can reduce the ab-senteeism threshold in a number of ways (Moch 1980; Buunk 1990). The tighter relation-ships a person has within the organization, the more pleasure he will have in his work, andthe higher the ‘absenteeism threshold’. In other words: tighter relationships of a persondecrease the chance this person stays in home and reports himself or herself ill. The impor-tance of ‘rewarding companionship’ is obvious (Buunk 1990): the more interactions are

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related to pleasure and positive feelings, the less negative feelings the person has at the endof the day, and the smaller the chances of stress.

In addition, it is to be expected that in the case of a high consensus on illegal absenteeismwithin a department—i.e., a low variance in the informal group norm—and of strong in-formal relations, the content of the informal group norm will influence the amount ofshort-term absenteeism within a department. In this way, the informal structure can beseen as a mechanism of control, to which the investments and returns of the employeesare compared. This means that if employees within a department agree highly that playingtruant once or twice a year is allowed, the short-term absentee rate will be higher than in adepartment in which the employees agree highly that playing truant is not accepted. In thesituation where the content of the norm is highly tolerant—i.e., playing truant is allowed—acompensation effect is expected: that is to say, the work of the absent employee will bedone by the others. In cases where departments have a higher intolerance group normsconcerning absenteeism, the tendency to restore the feelings of fairness will be weaker.On basis of this, the following hypothesis can be formulated:the more cohesive the de-partment, the stronger the effect of this informal group norm on the short-term absenteerate.

Long-term Absenteeism.According to the fairness theory of Adams (1965), the assump-tion can be made that if a department has a highly intolerant norm concerning absenteeism,the tendency to restore the feeling of fairness will be weaker. In this case of an extremelyintolerant norm on illegal absenteeism within a department, the rate of short-term absen-teeism will be very low. On the other hand, in these situations stress effects can be expected,which will effect long-term absentee rates (Buunk 1990; Van Yperen et al. 1994; Smulders1984). The third hypothesis can now be formulated:the long-term absentee rate is higher ina highly cohesive department with a highly intolerant norm concerning illegal absenteeismthan in other departments.

Methodology

The population examined consists of employees of a housing corporation. The organi-zation can be characterized as an organization with little hierarchy. The employees aredivided into eight teams or departments, which are comparable with respect to type ofwork and responsibilities. Each team has the responsibility to match houses with tenantsin a specific part of the city. These eight teams are examined in order to test the hypothe-ses. Excluding the newcomers (one or two weeks employed only), these teams consistof 62 employees, 27 women and 35 men. The employees who were absent because ofillness received the questionnaire at home. Of the 62 employees, 56 (90%) answered thequestionnaire.

To collect the (network) data, the employees received a questionnaire with standardizedquestions (August 1995). Before the data collection, a number of meetings were held withthe board of directors and the managers. The employees’ organization was also informed ofthe goal of the research, the design of the data collection and the consequences of possibleresults. After this, all employees of the organization were informed about the research and

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Table 1. Frequency of absenteeism within theorganization, divided into short-term (1–2 days),middle (3–5 days) and long-term(>5 days) absen-teeism(n = 62).

Frequency ofabsenteeism Short Middle Long

Not once 50% 64% 84%

Once or more 50% 36% 16%

the way data were to be obtained. All these activities were thought necessary to improvethe social basis of acceptance for this research.

Absenteeism. The data on some characteristics of the employees, such as age, gender,number of working hours, and the years of working in the organization, and the dataconcerning the absenteeism within the organization were obtained from the organization,and linked to the dataset of the questionnaire at an individual level. This means that bothfor the respondents and for the non-respondents these internal data of the organization wereobtained.

The total absentee rate in 1995, the year of the data collection, within the organization was.13. This means that, on average, the employees were absent for 13% of all working days inthe year. The data on absenteeism are divided in short-term (one or two days), middle (threeto five days) and long-term (longer than five days) absenteeism. In Table 1, dichotomizedfrequencies, of the three categories of absentee rates are given for the respondents and thenon-respondents jointly.

Of the 31 employees who were absent for a short-term once or more in 1995, 12 wereshort-term absent once, 10 twice, two employees three times, and three employees wereabsent four times for one or two days.

Compared with regional and national data on absenteeism the long-term absentee ratewithin this organization is especially high. The differences between the short-term andmiddle absentee rate found in this organization, and the regional and national data are small(Hoekstra 1995). The absentee rate of the non-respondents is significantly higher than theabsentee rate of the respondents (means are 18% and 7%, respectively;t (60) = 1.96).

Norm Concerning Illegal Absenteeism.The norm concerning illegal absenteeism is mea-sured by asking the respondent to indicate if they find each of the following reasons a ‘good’or ‘bad’ reason to report ill; (1) feeling miserable, (2) having problems at home or in privatelife, (3) feeling out of condition, (4) feeling fed up with the job, and (5) just not beingin the mood to work, without being ill. All respondents agree that ‘feeling miserable’ isa good reason to stay home, while 87% of the respondents also found ‘problems in theprivate sphere’ a good reason to call in sick, and 22% found ‘feeling out of condition’ agood reason. Only five and only two percent, respectively, said ‘feeling fed up with the job’and ‘not in the good mood to work’ were ‘good’ reasons to stay home for one or two days.

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In the given order, the five reasons can be combined to construct a perfect Guttman-scale.This means that the number of positive answers can be aggregated to a scale which will becalled ‘norm concerning illegal absenteeism’. The higher the value on this scale, the morean individual is tolerant to illegal absenteeism. The mean value of this scale at an individuallevel is found to be 2.21, and the standard deviation is .64.

To validate this measurement of the opinion of an employee, a question was includedin the questionnaire about the indispensability of work in one’s life: ‘What is youropinion on the following statement: My work is indispensable in my life?’ Respondentscould answer this question in four response categories: (1) totally disagree, (2) disagree,(3) agree, and (4) totally agree. The assumption is made that the more work is indis-pensable in someone’s life, the higher the work ethic of this person, and the less tolerantthis person is concerning illegal absenteeism. It was found that respondents who (totally)agreed with the statement that their work is indispensable in their lifes are indeed lesstolerant concerning illegal absenteeism:r = −.41, n = 56, p < .01. This confirms theassumption that the norm concerning illegal absenteeism is related to the individual’s workethic.

The deviation in the norm concerning illegal absenteeism was calculated at the departmentlevel: the lower the deviation in this norm at the department level, the higher the consensus onthe informal group norm concerning illegal absenteeism. Of the eight teams, three of themagree totally on this norm concerning illegal absenteeism. The mean within-departmentdeviation in this norm is .42.

Informal Relationships. In this article, attention is paid primarily to the friendship net-works within departments, because in this type of network the closeness of the relationis expressed the most. For the closeness of the relation, the respondents were asked toanswer the following question for all the other employees within the organization: “Withinan organization you feel a stronger bond with some people than with others. Can you statefor the following employees how strong your relationship is with him or her?” The relationto the employees can be characterized as (1) no bond at all, (2) not a very strong bond,(3) a relatively strong bond, or (4) a very strong bond.

For all the respondents, the average for this question was calculated, first for all theemployees of the organizations, and second for the employees of the department of therespondent. The closeness of the informal relations between employees within a depart-ment is measured as the average of the respondents within this department. At the sametime, the degree of symmetry (Wasserman and Faust 1994) was calculated. The relationsare, acceptably symmetrical: 79% of all relationships were symmetrical. This percentageincreases to 94 if the data are dichotomized. This means that if respondenti indicates astrong relation to respondentj , in 94% of all the relations, respondentj also indicates astrong or a relatively strong relation to respondenti .

To validate the question on the closeness of the informal relations within a department,the opinion of the respondent on the solidarity within the team was asked. The respondentcould answer in the following way: (1) no solidarity at all, to (4) very high solidarity. Asexpected, this answer is related strongly on an department level to the average closeness ofthe informal relations(r = .85, n = 8, p < .05).

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Results

Next, the various measurements are aggregated to the department level. The departmentsdiffer with respect to the degree of consensus concerning illegal absenteeism, the degree oftolerance in this informal norm, the degree of cohesion, that is the degree of closeness of theinformal relations within the same department, and the frequency of short-term absenteeism.In the following analyses, we will see if these variations are in the expected direction.

In congruence with the first hypothesis—the tightness of the relationships between em-ployees within a department is positively related to the consensus on the norm concern-ing illegal absenteeism—a significant, positive correlation between the consensus on theinformal group norm concerning illegal absenteeism and the closeness of the informalrelations within the department is found:r = .90 (n = 8, p < .01). According to thehomophily principle (Rogers 1979), close relations between employees within a departmentcan also be caused by other characteristics which are similar for the employees. In order toinvestigate this possibility, in addition to the correlation between consensus in the opinionsand the degree of cohesion within a department, correlations are also calculated between thedegree of cohesion within a department and the similarity in gender, in age, in full timers andthe years worked in this organization of the employee within a department. Furthermore,the degree of cohesion is correlated with the number of employees within a department.The different correlations are presented in Table 2.

In addition to the consensus on the group norm, only the relative number of full timerswithin a department is related to the degree of cohesion of the department; the higher therelative number of full timers, the more cohesive the department. In a regression compar-ison with the degree of cohesion within a department as the dependent variable and theconsensus in the norm concerning illegal absenteeism and the relative number of full timerswithin a department as independent variables, the effect of the percentage of full timers dis-appears completely. The degree of consensus, however, is still significant in the regressioncomparison. Despite the small number of departments, a significant relation between the

Table 2. Correlation and regression comparisons with the average degree of social cohe-sion between the employees as the dependent variable(n = 8).

Variables Correlation Regression B

Consensus in absentee norm .90∗∗ .54∗∗

Percentage of same-sex employees .24

(Standard) deviation in age .006

Percentage of full timers .79∗∗ .002

(Standard) deviation in years within the organization −.37

Number of employees within a team −.27

(Constant) 2.15∗∗

Percent of explained variance 81%∗∗

∗ p < .10.∗∗ p < .05.

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Table 3. Regression comparison with the relative number of employees withina team who were absent for a short-term once or more and were absent for along-term once or more as the dependent variable(n = 8).

B B BVariables (Short) (Long) (Long+middle)

Absentee norm 1.17∗∗ .02 .21

Degree of cohesion −.66∗ −.26 −.58

Norm∗ cohesion .29∗∗(1= tight)

Norm∗ cohesion .18 .82(1= intolerance, tight)

(Constant) .92 .85 1.94

Explained variance 77%∗∗ 19% 11%

∗ p < .10.∗∗ p < .0.5

degree of consensus in the norm concerning illegal absenteeism and the degree of cohesionwithin a department is found. This means that the first hypothesis is confirmed.

The second hypothesis will now be tested:the more cohesive the department, the strongerthe effect of this informal group norm on the short-term absentee rate. This hypothesis istested by means of a regression comparison with the relative number of employees withina department who were absent for one or two days on one or more occasions, as dependentvariable, and the degree of tolerance of the norm within a department and the degree ofcohesion within a department as independent variables. The hypothesis is expressed by theinteraction effect of the norm and the degree of cohesion. In addition, the two main effectsare included in the regression as control variables. The interaction variable is defined asthe product of the two centered variables. The results of this regression comparison arepresented in Table 3.

In the regression comparison, an effect of the degree of tolerance of the norm withina department on the short-term absentee rate is found; the more tolerant the employeesare regarding illegal absenteeism, the higher the short-term absentee rate. Besides this,a negative relation between the degree of cohesion and the short-term absentee rate isfound; the more cohesive a department, the lower the short-term absentee rate at the de-partment level. But most important for testing the hypothesis is the significant interactioneffect, which means that the effect of the tolerance of the norm, is stronger in depart-ments with a high degree of cohesion. Given these results, the conclusion can be drawnthat the short-term absentee rate of a department can be explained by the degree of toler-ance of the norm, the degree of cohesion, and an interaction between the degree of cohe-sion and the norm of the department. This confirms the hypothesis concerning short-termabsenteeism.

The third hypothesis concerns the effect on the long-term absentee rate:the long-term absentee rate is higher in a highly cohesive department with a highly intolerantnorm concerning illegal absenteeism than in other departments. To test this hypothesis,

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a regression comparison again is calculated. This time the long-term absentee rate ofthe department is the dependent variable, and the degree of tolerance of the norm, thedegree of cohesion and an interaction between these two are the independent variables.This time, the interaction mainly distinguishes the two departments in which the em-ployees have highly intolerant opinions concerning illegal absenteeism and are very closeto each other socially, from the other six departments. The results are also presented inTable 3.

The results show that none of the variables have a significant effect on long-term absen-teeism. The joint effect of the three variables also is non-significant. This is more or less thesame if the long and middle term absentee rates are summed. So, long-term absenteeismand middle and long-term absenteeism taken together, cannot be explained by the normof the department concerning illegal absenteeism, nor by the degree of cohesion withinthe department, nor by an interaction of these two effects. This means that our hypothesisconcerning the effects of long-term absenteeism is not confirmed.

In the above analyses, only characteristics of the departments are considered. In addition,it is relevant to consider the individual characteristics such as gender, age, or the numberof years an employee is working in the organization. For this reason, differences betweendepartments are examined by controlling for characteristics of the employees.

To combine the effects at the employee and department levels the data are analyzed bymeans of a multi-level analysis (Raudenbush and Bryk 1986). In a multi-level analysis, boththe influence of characteristics at the individual and department level will be analyzed. Forthese multi-level analyses the VARCL program was used (Longford 1986, 1988). Effectsof individual variables are tested byz-tests applied to the ratio ‘estimate/standard error’.Joint effects of several variables are tested by chi-squared tests applied to the contributionof these variables to the deviance (minus twice the log-likelihood).

In multi-level analysis, the variance in the dependent variable is divided into variancethat can be accounted for by department level variables, and variance that can be accountedfor by individual level variables. The dependent variable is dichotomous, so the “binary”option of VARCL is chosen (cf. Longford 1986, 1988). Accordingly, no attention is paidto the percentage of explained variance. In the first model (model 1) the effects of theindividual variables on short- and long-term absenteeism are reported. Subsequently, thevariables at department level are added (model 2).

A problem by adding the mean norm concerning illegal absenteeism, and the degree ofcohesion within a department as department characteristics is that, especially if the numberof employees within a department is small, the effect of the opinion of the individualemployee and his or her relations with the other employees in this department has an effecton the mean norm concerning absenteeism and on the social cohesion of that department.To put in other words: the closeness of relations of the individual employee is highlycorrelated with the social cohesion of the department, and the opinion of an employeewithin a department is highly correlated with the informal group norm concerning illegalabsenteeism of the department. For this, in the multi-level analysis, the opinion concerningillegal absenteeism, and the closeness of the relations of the individual employee are addedas individual characteristics. Beside these two individual characteristics gender, age, typeof work relation (full time or part time) and experience (years an employee is working in

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Table 4. The effects of characteristics of the employee and characteristics of the team (logistic regression).

Short Long

Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 1 Model 2

Gender(1= woman) −.07 .15 −1.16 −1.10

Age −.15 −.16 −.01 .003

Type of work relation (1= full time) −.33 −.43 −2.14∗∗ −1.97∗∗

Experience .06 −.11 −1.33∗∗ −1.16∗

Opinion concerning illegal absenteeism 2.03 2.01 .91 .98

Individual relations −1.56 −.58 1.41 1.31

Absentee norm 10.83∗∗ 1.62

Cohesion team −9.31∗∗ −1.55

Norm∗ cohesion 4.62∗∗ −2.81

(Constant) 5.66 −39.97 1.29 2.09

Deviance 67.64 40.27 55.08 53.90

Difference in deviance 4.75 27.37∗∗ 21.79∗∗ 1.18

Difference in df 6 3 6 3

∗ p < .10.∗∗ p < .05.

this organization) are added at the individual level. The results of the multi-level analysisare given in Table 4.

For the short-term absentee rate, the results of model 1 show that the individualvariables—gender, age, type of work relation, experience, the opinion concerning illegalabsenteeism and the closeness of the individual relations—do not have a jointly significantcontribution: difference in deviance= 4.75, df= 6, p > .10. By adding the characteristicsof the department—degree of the tightness of the relations between the employees withina department, the group norm concerning illegal absenteeism and the interaction of thistwo effects—the model improves significantly (difference in deviance= 27.27, df = 3,p < .01). Furthermore, the direction of the effects at the department characteristics is sim-ilar to those found in the regression comparison (Table 3). This means that the hypothesisconcerning the short-term absentee rate still is supported.

The story is quite different for the long-term absentee rate. For this kind of absenteeism theindividual characteristics have a jointly significant effect (difference in deviance= 21.79,df = 6, p < .01). In this first model, the effect of the gender and the age of the employeeis significant. In contrast to ‘common knowledge’, we found that men were more longtime absent than women (i.e., longer than five days), and, also in contrast to ‘commonknowledge’, the effect of age is negative: the younger the employee, the higher chance thathe or she was absent for a long time. The (almost zero) effects found in the second model—for the characteristics of the department—are quite similar to the results of the regressioncomparison found before (Table 3): characteristics at the department do not influence thelong-term absentee rate.

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Conclusion and Discussion

In the theoretical elaboration of thefairnesstheory (Adams 1965), the informal group normplays an important role, because, according to this theory, employees within a departmentcompare themselves to each other on basis of this norm. The ratio between investmentsand returns has to be in balance, otherwise actions, for instance a short-term of absence,will be taken. It was hypothesized that employees within a department will develop tightinformal relations with each other, dependent on the level of agreement in the informal groupnorm concerning illegal absenteeism. It was also hypothesized that the more cohesive adepartment, the stronger the effect of this norm on the short-term absentee rate. The expectedrelations between the variance of the informal group norm, the closeness of the informalrelations, and the effect of the norm were confirmed by our data. The conclusion is thatthe closeness of the informal relationships between the employees of a department, thevariance in the informal group norm concerning illegal absenteeism, and the content ofthe norm (degree of tolerance) indeed have an effect on the ‘absenteeism threshold’ ofemployees within an organization. The closer the relations between the employees within adepartment, if combined with a consensus on an intolerant informal group norm on illegalabsenteeism, the lower the short-term absentee rate.

Furthermore, is was hypothesized that in a highly cohesive group, a highly intolerantgroup norm concerning illegal absenteeism, because of stress effects, has an effect onthe rate of long-term absenteeism. This hypothesis is not confirmed. These results werealso found in a multi-level analysis in which individual characteristics are controlled. Thismeans that it can be concluded that in contrast to the rate for short-term absenteeism, therate for middle and long-term absenteeism is less dependent on the social environment ofthe department. The most likely explanation is that in cases of long-term absenteeism, theemployee is not playing truant or taking it easy for a couple of days but is really ill. Forthese situations research on the ‘continuation threshold’ would perhaps be more appropriate,where attention is paid to the length of long-term absenteeism. Research can show whetheror not, in the same way as for the ‘absenteeism threshold’, informal ties influence this‘continuation threshold’. For this, and for the research on the ‘absenteeism threshold’,research can be extended to different kinds of organizations, for instance private and publicorganizations.

The findings that the long-term absentee rate is not influenced as much by the informalnetwork as the short-term absentee rate can also be clarified by the work done by Flacheand Macy (1996). They found that informal social relations affect cooperation betweenmembers of a group, but that the social relations have a double edge. Networks help peopleto work together when relationships are used as instruments for social pressure. However,social ties may also undermine social control, particularly in small groups. Given theseresults, we can conclude that short-term absenteeism is influenced much more by informalrelations within the department than long-term absenteeism.

In the theoretical elaboration of this article, the choice was made to ignore the causaldirection between the differences in opinions concerning illegal absenteeism and the close-ness of the informal relations. Given the cross-sectional data no statements concerning thecausality-direction can be made. So, it can be that opinions concerning illegal absenteeism

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influence informal relations. In this case the individual starts with a stable opinion concern-ing illegal absenteeism, and according to the consensus of this norm within a department,tight relations are expected to develop. But, it can also be that close informal relationsinfluence consensus in opinions, because employees are close friends, and are cohesive ondepartment level. In this case their opinions develop to each other. Further research andlongitudinal data are necessary to test these hypotheses. In this further research, attentionmust be paid to the fact that sick employees, being less at work, are less likely, to developclose relations, and that in work relations having the same opinions concerning illegalabsenteeism may have important consequences.

The main conclusion of this research is that the closeness of informal relations betweenthe employees within a highly intolerant department has a negative influence on the absen-tee rate for short-term absenteeism. When speculating on these results, the most logicalway to decrease the absentee rate would be to change the composition of the teams, with-out changing the winning teams that are homogeneously composed and have already lowlevels of absenteeism. Of course, this will, because of special qualities of the employ-ees and preferences for a special department, not always be possible. Nevertheless, giventhis conclusion, organizations can influence absentee rates by paying attention to the in-formal structure of their organizations. For instance, organizations can arrange informalactivities such as lunches, department parties, sport events or survival camps. When ar-ranging these activities during working hours, employees have no reason to stay away.All these activities give employees a chance to restore the balance between own invest-ments and returns. In this context, Wilson (1989) talks about ‘the sense of mission’ ofan organization. By telling the employees within an organization clearly what is the goalof the organization, what are the goals for the future, and what are the responsibilities ofthe employees in reaching these goals, employees will be likely to become a part of theorganization.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Tom Snijders, Amber van den Bos, Durk Hak, Frans Stokman, andWerner Raub for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. In this research, a resurgence of the Human Relation School (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939; Mayo 1933)can be seen.

2. Within an organization (Weenig 1993), two kinds of communication can be distinguished; the formal andthe informal communication. The formal communication consists of all forms of communication within theformal structure of the organizations. The informal communication (Koeleman 1992) can be defined as all thecommunication between the employees which takes part outside the formal structure. More or less similardefinitions are found in Grieco (1987), Stevenson and Gilly (1991), Pfeffer (1992) and Krackhardt and Hanso(1993). The communication lines within an organization, both the formal and the informal, can differ instrength. Granovetter (1973: 1361) defines the strength of a tie as the combination of the amount of timeinvested in each other, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (the trust for each other), and the mutual services.

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Karin Sandershas an M.A. in Psychology and Ph.D. in Sociology (both from University of Groningen). She is anAssociate Professor in policy, labor market and organization theory at the Department of Sociology, University ofGroningen. She published several articles on differences between women and men on the labor market and withinorganizations, and the influence of different positions in informal networks on this. She is also a staff member ofICS, the Netherlands.

Sigrid Hoekstra has an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Groningen. The reporter introduction of therelatioin between informal networks (labor satisfaction) and absenteeism within an organization was subject ofher Master’s thesis. Currently she is an account manager at the ‘north’ department of the Government BuildingsAgency.

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Informal Networks and Absenteeism Within an Organization