Browsing by Author "Budde, Karri"

Presenteeism (working despite feeling sick) has become a popular object for research in occupational psychology in the 21st century. It has been claimed that stressful psychosocial aspects of work (e.g. job demands) are connected to presenteeism. The purpose of this degree was to find out what can be said about these connections considering current scientific evidence. Another goal was to examine the directionality of these connections, although the causality from job demands to presenteeism was analyzed more thoroughly than the other possible directions. The cross-sectional evidence on connections between job demands and presenteeism is rather incomplete. There have been multiple studies in which the statistically significant correlation between these two phenomena have been found, but the direction of causality cannot be deduced from these studies. There are several ways to operationalize job demands and it has been concluded by a meta-analysis that the strongest connections to presenteeism seem to be with physical demands of work, understaffing, overtime work and general time pressure. There are few longitudinal studies on this issue but from these few studies there has arisen partial support for the idea that higher job demands can lead to presenteeism. The most relevant take-away message from these studies is that the connections between job demands and presenteeism may well be reciprocal and lead to a vicious circle. The biggest limitations in studies are related to the cross-sectionality, the sole use of self-report methods and the poor generalizability due to selected samples. In addition, there have been conversations about the reliability and validity of the self-report measures used in research. Due to these limitations, not much can be said about the connections between job demands and presenteeism. The correlative connections have been repeatedly replicated in various studies which indicates that there most likely is some sort of connection between these two phenomena. However, the prominent use of cross-sectional studies makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the direction of causality. Theoretical frameworks have been underutilized in the planning of studies and there hasn’t been enough research on specific hypotheses derived from these theories. The current scientific evidence is too general. Hence, it’s not possible to analyze the connections between job demands and presenteeism very precisely. These shortcomings can be mended in the future by focusing on well-designed longitudinal studies.