Transformational and passive avoidant leadership as determinants of absenteeism PDF

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-7739.htm Determinants of Transformational and passive absenteeism avoidant leadership as determinants of absenteeism Jeff Frooman and Morris B. Mendelson 447 University of New Brunswick Saint John, Sa...

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-7739.htm

Transformational and passive avoidant leadership as determinants of absenteeism Jeff Frooman and Morris B. Mendelson University of New Brunswick Saint John, Saint John, Canada, and

J. Kevin Murphy Canada Post, Saint John, Canada

Determinants of absenteeism

447 Received December 2010 Revised January 2012 Accepted January 2012

Abstract Purpose – Does leadership style affect absenteeism in a company? The purpose of this paper is to contrast the effects of two leadership styles – transformational and passive avoidant – on absenteeism, both legitimate and illegitimate, as mediated by job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – A self-report questionnaire was completed by a sample of 120 employees of a national mail delivery company. Hierarchical regressions were used to analyze the data. Findings – It was found that transformational leadership decreases illegitimate absenteeism, while passive avoidant leadership increases it. In regard to legitimate absenteeism, transformational leadership is shown to have no effect, while passive avoidant leadership is shown to be negatively related to it. Together, the findings regarding passive avoidant leaders suggest their subordinates tend to come to work when ill (presenteeism), but stay away from work when well (illegitimate absenteeism). Practical implications – For managers trying to reduce the costs of absenteeism, this suggests that leadership style can make a difference. Managers who give subordinates very little attention, or attention only when they have done something wrong – the passive avoidant style – are likely to experience the higher costs of both absenteeism and presenteeism. Adopting the transformational style may help to reduce these costs. Originality/value – The paper helps to extend the current work on leadership; it examines the passive avoidant style, which remains understudied to date; and it enriches our understanding of the relationship between leadership style and absenteeism as an outcome variable by moving beyond a uni-dimensional conceptualization of absenteeism. Finally, it serves as a basis for future research by providing evidence for a somewhat counter-intuitive finding that, under passive avoidant leaders, workers appear to come to work when sick, but stay away from work when well. Keywords Canada, Transformational leadership, Transactional leadership, Absenteeism, Job satisfaction, Legitimate absenteeism, Illegitimate absenteeism, Mediation Paper type Research paper

In the USA the average employee is absent from the workplace 1.6 per cent of their scheduled work time, amounting to some 400 million lost work days per year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2011). In Great Britain some 175 million work days are lost due to absences, costing the economy 32.8 billion euros per year, and costing individual employers some 841 euros per employee per year. In the Netherlands the amount lost per employee per year is estimated at 1,268 euros (Edwards and Greasley, 2010). Clearly, controlling employee absenteeism is critical to all employers attempting to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. As argued by Gaudine and Saks, “[T]he ability of a programme or policy to decrease absenteeism by even a small amount may mean large financial savings as well as important quality implications” (2001, p. 16). Given the costs involved, determining the antecedents of absenteeism, and ultimately trying to control them, is something of an imperative, and as a result has

Leadership & Organization Development Journal Vol. 33 No. 5, 2012 pp. 447-463 r Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0143-7739 DOI 10.1108/01437731211241247

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been the subject of numerous studies since the 1960s. Many studies have focused on worker attributes such as race (Avery et al., 2007), attitudes such as job satisfaction (Harrison et al., 2006), and personality traits such as Machiavellianism (Aziz, 2004). Other studies have focused on the workers’ supervisors, examining such things as abusive supervision (Tepper, 2007), leadership style (Zhu et al., 2005), and general measures of satisfaction with one’s supervision (Hackett, 1989). Still other studies have looked at factors pertaining to the job or the organization. This includes variables long believed to be related to absenteeism, such as pay, satisfaction with co-workers, promotion opportunities (Hackett, 1989), stress level (Allebeck and Mastekaasa, 2004), and more recently, the existence of an “absence culture” (Rentsch and Steel, 2003), the effects of high performance work systems (Den Hartog and Verburg, 2004), and the presence of a collective bargaining agreement (Dionne and Dostie, 2007). Larger and broader contextual factors, such as institutional or economic factors, have also been considered. This includes factors such as the level of unemployment in the economy (Spierdijka et al., 2009), and changing societal norms in the hyper-competitive global economy regarding the tolerance of absence from work (Taylor et al., 2010). For individual managers seeking to reduce absenteeism, many of the determinants of absenteeism are completely out of their control (e.g. employment levels), others may be partially within their control (e.g. promotion opportunities), and only a few are completely within their control. Leadership style is one such determinant that is directly within the control of a manager. Bernard Bass (1997) argues that leadership style “can be learned, and [y] research has shown that leaders at all levels can be trained to be charismatic in both verbal and nonverbal performance” (p. 328). In other words, leadership style is chosen, and is therefore changeable by a manager (Burns, 1978). Given the high cost of absenteeism, given the possible association between management style and absenteeism, and given that leadership style is one variable over which a manager has direct control, we pose the question: what exactly is the relationship between leadership style – specifically the transformational and transactional types – and absenteeism? Studies examining the link between transformational leadership and absenteeism have produced mixed results – either showing a negative correlation (Richardson and Vandenberg, 2005; Walumbwa and Lawler, 2003; Zhu et al., 2005), or no correlation (Gakovic, 2002; Walumbwa et al., 2004; Wang and Walumbwa, 2007). Only Zhu et al. (2005) have considered the link between transactional leadership and absenteeism (which they found to be non-significant), and their work is the only one to directly compare the effects of the two contrasting leadership styles. Furthermore, psychological processes, including ones already found to be related to absenteeism, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, that may help to explain the effects of these differing leadership styles on absenteeism, have been left largely unaddressed in the literature. Moreover, the research to date has treated absenteeism as a uni-dimensional construct, failing to make at least one important distinction that exists in the literature – the difference between legitimate and illegitimate absenteeism. Thus the empirical relationship between leadership style and absenteeism is far from clear, and the theoretical relationship seems underdeveloped. These considerations suggest there is room for further investigation, and so in this study we examine leadership style (transformational vs passive avoidant, which is a type of transactional leadership) as a predictor of absenteeism, mediated by job satisfaction. In doing so, we make four contributions in this paper. The first three come in the front end and are in regard to our study design: first, we seek to directly compare

transformational leadership with transactional leadership in regard to absenteeism, which as we note above, has only been done in one other study. Specifically, we work with the passive avoidant form of the transactional leadership style, a form proposed by Avolio et al. (1999), but which remains understudied to date. Second, we take into account the two distinct kinds of absenteeism just identified – legitimate and illegitimate – and model them into our study. Third, we model job satisfaction as an intermediate variable between leadership style and absenteeism. Better understanding the psychological process involved, by bringing into play an attitude such as job satisfaction is long overdue, and as we argue below, a necessary part of making sense of the relationship between leadership and absenteeism. The fourth contribution comes at the back end of the paper and is in regard to a somewhat counter-intuitive finding we make about passive avoidant leadership – it increases illegitimate absenteeism, but decreases legitimate absenteeism. In other words, under passive avoidant leaders, workers appear to come to work when sick, but stay away from work when well. Our proposed model is presented in Figure 1, and in the following sections we discuss the hypothesized paths.

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1. Two contrasting leadership styles Of considerable interest in the current leadership literature are two contrasting leadership styles – transformational and transactional leadership. For the most part the styles are considered to be separate constructs, such that leaders can display both types of styles (Burns, 1978; Hater and Bass, 1988). And while there has been some debate about this (e.g. Pawar, 2003), as we explain below we use an extreme variant of transactional leadership, partly to insure that the constructs are distinct. a. Transformational leadership Four dimensions are said to comprise transformational leadership and together they serve to define the style (Bass, 1985a; Bass and Avolio, 1994). The first dimension, idealized influence, refers to leaders who articulate a collective vision, and promote morally uplifting values. The second dimension is inspirational motivation through which the transformational leader is said to raise the level of employees’ aspirations to higher-order needs and focuses employees on the shared goals of the collective (Burns, 1978). Intellectual stimulation is achieved by increasing the scope of employee involvement by encouraging their participation in decision making, encouraging creativity and experimentation, and empowering employees to take risks and make +, (+)

+ , (–) Transformational leadership

+

–

Legitimate absenteeism

Passive avoidant leadership

–

–

Illegitimate absenteeism

+, (+) –, (–)

Note: Mediated relationships are in parentheses

Figure 1. Hypothesized relationships: direct and mediated

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decisions. Finally, individualized consideration, involves treating each employee as an individual, by providing constructive feedback and encouragement to each. These dimensions have been shown be distinct through factor analysis (Bass, 1985b; Hater and Bass, 1988; Lowe et al., 1996). The transformational leader, then, serves as a coach and a mentor and endows employees with decision-making authority, empowering them and helping them to grow individually and within the team (Bass, 1994; Bass, 2008; Bass and Avolio, 1994; Bass and Riggio, 2006). b. Transactional and passive avoidant leadership In the transactional leadership style, leadership amounts to a social exchange process involving a series of transactions between the leader and the led, wherein the leader exchanges rewards for services rendered (Burns, 1978), or what Bass (1985a) characterized as a cost-benefit exchange process. Transactional leadership actually encompasses four styles. Contingent reward uses positive methods to encourage employee performance. Simply put, such leaders state their expectations and use rewards and incentives to prompt employees to achieve those expectations. Laissez-faire management involves a “hands-off” approach toward workers and their performance, characterized by neglect of employees by the leader, abdication of responsibility, not responding to employee problems, and a lack of monitoring of their work performance. With passive management by exception (MBE-passive) leaders only use punishment as a reaction to unacceptable performance after it has occurred. Conversely, leaders who use active management by exception (MBEactive), attempt to correct unacceptable performance while it is occurring, essentially actively seeking variances from standards and disciplining employees accordingly (Bass, 1985a; Hater and Bass, 1988; Lowe et al., 1996; Tavanti, 2008). In this paper we focus on the two transactional leadership styles that are said to comprise the “passive avoidant” style of leadership – MBE-passive and laissez-faire. From the outset, transformational leadership scholars have suggested that these two styles are closely related – that the two are positioned at the bottom of a “hierarchy of effectiveness” (Bass, 2008) or at the same end of a continuum. In the continuum, transformational leadership would anchor one end, and the continuum would run through contingent reward, MBE-active, MBE-passive, with laissez-faire anchoring the far end (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985a; Bass and Avolio, 1994). Empirical analysis has shown that the laissez-faire and the MBE-passive items in the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) are highly correlated (Yammarino and Bass, 1990; Den Hartog et al., 1997), something Bass (1985a, b) had observed when developing the questionnaire. As a result, Avolio et al. (1999) combined the two as “passive avoidant leadership”, and found them to stand empirically as a separate factor in their multi-factor leadership model. We focus on passive avoidance because by their very definitions, it does not seem possible for someone to be both transformational and passive avoidant. After all, transformational leadership, at its very essence, is active – formulating and expressing vision and shared goals, giving feedback, providing encouragement – all these aspects require engagement far beyond the range of the passive avoidant leader. Thus there should be less overlap of variables – by more clearly separating the two leadership style constructs we can hopefully reduce the confounding effects they may have on one another. Furthermore, we acknowledge that this is an exploratory study, and that given the heightened contrast that we believe exists between transformational leadership and passive avoidant leadership we believe that if significant differences will show up anywhere, they should show up between these two styles of leadership.

2. Predicted relationships In our model, type of leadership style is the predictor, job satisfaction is the mediator, and type of absenteeism is the criterion variable (see Figure 1). a. Effect of leadership style on job satisfaction Employees experience greater job satisfaction with leaders who emphasize support, feedback, and the empowerment of their subordinates (Rafferty and Griffin, 2006; Walumbwa and Lawler, 2003). Such individualized consideration and employee involvement reflects what Bass (1985a) identified as both a “developmental orientation” and “supportive leadership”, which he believed critical to generating job satisfaction amongst employees. It has further been established that transformational leaders who seek to inspire their subordinates through their vision and who strive to make that vision meaningful to the subordinates results in greater job satisfaction amongst those subordinates (Bass, 1997, 2008). Furthermore, the transformational leader is thought to alter the values, preferences, and aspirations of subordinates, elevating them to higher-order needs and by doing so increase their satisfaction in their work (Podsakoff et al., 1996; Sparks and Schenk, 2001; Yukl, 1999). Therefore, we hypothesize that transformational leadership leads to increased job satisfaction. The earliest empirical work supported this hypothesis, and the first meta-analysis of transformational leadership, though focused on the differences between male and female leadership styles did show support for transformational leadership leading to greater job satisfaction (Eagly et al., 2003). A second meta-analysis, which directly tested the relationship, also showed a significant positive relationship between the two variables (Judge and Piccolo, 2004). Subsequent studies hypothesizing the positive relationship have consistently produced the same results (e.g. Castro et al., 2008; Erkutlu, 2008; Hobman et al., 2011; Kuo et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2010). And now a third, recently published, meta-analysis has added additional support to the results of the first two meta-analyses – the existence of a positive relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction (Derue et al., 2011): H1a. Perceived transformational leadership will be positively related to job satisfaction. As we note in the previous section, in this paper we focus on the most extreme form of transactional leadership – passive avoidance. We assume the passive avoidant leader is passive to the point of being neglectful of employees’ need to find meaning in their work by failing to articulate a vision and providing the inspiration for that vision (Bass, 1997, 2008). Either employees can be viewed as having discretion, but only up until they make an error (in the MBE-passive form of passive avoidant leadership), or employees can be viewed as being completely neglected (in the laissez faire form of passive avoidant leadership). In neither case does the passive avoidant leader provide any positive feedback nor is the employee ever really empowered to be an autonomous decision maker (Bass, 2008; Bass and Riggio, 2006). The passive avoidant leader is, in short, essentially the opposite of the transformational leader in every regard (Avolio et al., 1999; Bass, 1985b; Den Hartog et al., 1997; Yammarino and Bass, 1990). Thus our model proposes that passive avoidant leadership will result in decreased job satisfaction. Empirical studies of the relationship have produced mixed results. The metaanalysis of Judge and Piccolo (2004) examined the various aspects of transactional

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leadership. Their analysis showed that laissez-faire leadership negatively correlated to job satisfaction, but that MBE-passive leadership had no significant relationship with job satisfaction. Subsequent studies examining the links between MBE-passive and laissez-faire with job satisfaction have shown negative relationships to hold for both (Erkutlu, 2008; Walumbwa et al., 2005), or that MBE-passive has a negative relationship while laissez-faire has no significant relationship (Berson and Linton, 2005). Significantly, the recently published meta-analysis of Derue et al. (2011) does show negative relationships between both forms of passive avoidant leadership and job satisfaction: H1b. Perceived passive avoidant leadership will be negatively related to job satisfaction. b. Effect of job satisfaction on absenteeism Absenteeism is not a uni-dimensional construct. Absences can be authorized or unauthorized, depending on whether employees have the approval of their superiors (Majchrzak, 1987). Absences can be voluntary or involuntary, depending on whether employees have a legitimate illness (Moore, 1947, p. 254). Furthermore, voluntary absences can be physical or psychological, depending on the nature of an illness; or explicitly or implicitly defined depending on the nature of one’s employment – union contracts, for example, are far more explicit in their definitions of illness (Atkin and Goodman, 1984). We believe that the incorporation of these typologies in the modeling of the relationship between leadership and absenteeism is long overdue. Therefore, in this study we introduce to the analysis one such typology – the voluntary vs involuntary dimensions, renaming them legitimate and illegitimat...