Should I stay (at home) or should I go (to work): individual and contextual antecedents of absenteeism and presenteeism. Evidence from a privatized Italian organization.

The present work contributes to the study of attendance behaviors by analyzing the agentic and proactive components of individual behaviors, strongly required in the today’s work situation in order to facilitate people in handling competition, actively shaping changes and taking advantages from it. In fact, rooted in the social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), the current work stresses the role of self-efficacy in directly and indirectly impacting the decision to take a day-off or to attend work despite unhealthy medical conditions. Additionally, in line with the importance of adopting a longitudinal approach (Mason & Griffin, 2003) and including social dynamics (Johns, 1997) in the study of absenteeism, the current work explores temporal variations in absences and tests how social context can explain changes across time. For this latter purpose, social context has been conceptualized through the perceptions of social context (PoSC; Borgogni, Dello Russo, Di Tecco, Alessandri, & Vecchione, 2011), operationalized as the individuals’ perceptions of the most relevant social constituencies of the organization (i.e., immediate supervisor, colleagues and top management) and of their behaviors. Finally, according to a psychological view of presenteeism (Johns, 2011), the present work investigates whether and how self-initiated change behaviors model the tendency to work if ill, measuring a relatively new construct, job crafting, which designs the physical, cognitive and relational changes that people make in some aspects of their work (Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2012; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Specifically, three studies were designed, presented as follows. The first study, consistent with social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), aimed to deepen the concurrent role of self-efficacy and job satisfaction in predicting absenteeism, testing both a direct and indirect relation in two different groups of employees, based on their length of service within the organization. The second contribution intended to study the dynamic and accrual over time of absence behaviors. It analyzed different absenteeism trajectories over four years of employees who differed in years of organizational tenure. Moreover, it investigated the impact of social influence on these changes, testing the effect of perceptions of social context (i.e., perceptions of colleagues, immediate supervisor and top management) on absenteeism trajectories. Finally, the third study focused on presenteeism. It explored the role of self-efficacy and job crafting in shaping the phenomenon and it investigated its consequences on job performance, as rated by supervisors. Moreover, as job crafting is a rather new construct, it explored the relation between efficacy beliefs and crafting behaviors.