Âge, absence-maladie et présentéisme au travail: le cas d'un établissement de santé régional

• Published in: Revue management & avenir 2014-06 (70), p.97
• Main Authors: Huver, Benjamin, Richard, Sébastien, Vaneecloo, Nicolas, Bierla, Ingrid
• Format: Article
• Language: fre
• Subjects: Employees; Hospitals; Inpatient care; Organizational behavior; Population; Studies; Variables
• ISSN: 1768-5958; 1969-6574

We explore the relationship between age and two organizational behaviors: short-term sickness absence and presenteeism (situation of an employee attending work while sick). To do so, we study the case of a regional hospital with 4000 employees. This paper's main assumption is that absence nil values (no absence reported) can be explained either by a good health status or by presenteeism behavior. A Zero-Inflated Binomial Model enables the differentiation of these two sources of nil values, but allows also the estimation of an expected absence value and a presenteeism probability for each individual. This methodology is applied to four different age categories. Our results show that two effects play simultaneously, but cancel each other out at first glance. On the one hand, the expected absence value is higher for older employees than for others, as already shown in the literature. When they are absent, seniors experience longer absence periods probably because of a poorer health status and a slower recovery. But on the other hand, older employees also show higher presenteeism probabilities. In other words, they are also more likely to attend when sick.