Men are more likely to attend work while sick with autocratic managers. Women are not.

[GYre0ePJhZ]

Hey Everyone.

 

In doing research for my Master's thesis in Organizational Psychology I came over this article with a piece of data which I found interesting and that I thought may be of interest for the Freedomain Radio conversation as well. No matter what comes of this I atleast want it to be out there. I apologize in advance for my English as it is not my native language.

 

The tentative conclusion of this board post is that men are more likely to attend work while sick when they have autocratic managers, while women are not. I will provide the data for this conclusion and continue to speculate with that this may have its genesis in the upbringing of boys, which are to a greater degree than girls conditioned to follow orders and act in the interests of their superiors. Limitations to both the conclusion and the speculation will be provided before I turn the virtual microphone over to you the readers and request your feedback.

 

I borrow support for the claim of this board post from an article published by Scandinavian Journal of Public Health in 2008 written by Nyberg, Westerlund, Hanson and Theorell with the title: Managerial leadership is associated with self-reported sickness absence and sickness presenteeism among Swedish men and women. Link: http://sjp.sagepub.com/content/36/8/803.short (My apologies, behind Paywall)

 

The rest of this board post up until the last two paragraphs present relevant details of the study for increased legitimacy, persuasiveness and ability for others to scrutinize:

 

• Sample: 5141 Swedish employees.
• Design: Cross-sectional questionnaire study.

Definitions and measurements as used by the authors of the article:

• Sickness presenteeism defined as "attending work while sick". The authors did not provide the wording of the question, but it can be deducted that it was a question which requested the frequency of the act of sickness presenteeism over the past 12 months.
• Autocratic leadership was not defined, but the details surrounding how it was measured I think will give a sufficient understanding: Autocratic leadership is a subscale developed in the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness Programme (GLOBE). Again, the exact wording of how it was measured was not provided, but the "Autocratic leadership" dimension contained four questions which asked whether the management style was:

• Autocratic (makes decisions in a dictatorial way)
• Bossy (tells subordinates what to do in a commanding way)
• Elitist (believes that a small number of people with similar backgrounds are superior and should enjoy privileges)
• Dictatorial (forces her/his values and opinions on others)

 

The statistical analysis was a multiple logistic regression built in three steps (Models):

 

The first step (Model 1) was adjusted for age, marital status, having children living at home, taking care of an elderly or handicapped person, employment category, and labour-market sector. In the second step (Model 2) we added the workplace variables demands, control, and social support, and in the third model (Model 3) (...) degree of satisfaction with life in general.

 

 

The following table provide the results of the analysis. The numbers without parentheses represent the odds ratio for sickness presenteeism and were calculated as the risk of having four or more such occasions over the past year. The numbers inside the parentheses represent the Confidence Intervals.

 

 

 

In conclusion: The data support that men are associated with a statistically significant increased likelihood (OR = 1.76) of exhibiting sickness presenteeism when their manager show autocratic leadership at an often frequency as opposed to when their manager does so seldom. Women do not show such a statistically significant behavior pattern.

 

I speculate that this may have its genesis in the upbringing of boys, which are perhaps to a greater degree than girls conditioned to follow orders and act in the interests of their superiors. Showing up to work while sick can perhaps be interpreted as a fullfillment of obligations and/or interests of a superior. Keywords here can e.g. be: The military, the disposable male, tax cattle. I could have written much more about this, but I think this post is long enough as it is.

 

I will now provide limitations to both the conclusion and the speculation:

 

Limitations of the conclusion:

• Cross-sectional and self-report design
• When demands, control, social support and satisfaction with life in general is accounted for as in M2 and M3 the pattern does not show up.
• Gender segregation between the private and public sectors in Sweden (67 % of men worked in private sector as opposed to 34 % of the women)
• Different labour markets for men and women
• Differences in communication patterns between male- and female dominated occupations.

Limitations of the speculation:

• My own biases
• My greatly limited knowledge of gender studies
• It can be a million other reasons

 

I do not, however, want to sell my conclusion and speculation short as I do think there might be some truths to them. What do you think of it?

 

Finally, I want to ask you what you think of this board post in general be it form or content. I, for one, do suspect that it is too inaccessible for laymen. Please be constructive if you choose to give feedback.

 

Kind Regards

[Daniel Unplugged]

I think it is very important that they did not control for the public/private sector. It would have been incredibly easy to do so. Further, I think that it is quite possible that this factor could be responsible for the entire difference between men and women, since I generally believe that those in the public sector are lazy and don't feel the the same sense of obligation to their employer, as do private sector employees. After all, those in the public sector are unlikely to ever lose their job, regardless of their performance. Personally, I would disregard that study completely.

[GYre0ePJhZ]

Thanks for the reply. I think you are right about it not saying much because it did not control for public and private sector.

[Daniel Unplugged]

Lazy was probably not the right word for me to use, I will be more precise about what I meant. Public sector workers are, more so than private, unionised. Union leaders tend to instill an entitlement mentality in their members, that they are entitled to get paid when they do not work. Given that public sector, mostly unionised workers end up holding that belief, they are less likely to think twice about having a sickie, and, I would expect that trend to show up whether or not the manager is autocratic. For private employees, the culture is a little different. They know, to a much greater extent than public employees, that their job security is largely dependent on the amount of profit they can generate for their employer. So I think they would be less likely to take sickies in general, but especially so if their manager is autocratic, since they would be fearful of the repercussions of taking too many sick days. An autocratic manager in the public sector "cannot" fire workers, so his autocraticness makes little difference to whether or not the workers take sick days.

 

While the results of your T test surprise me (I'm only pretending to know what that means), I cannot dispute them. Yes, lazy workers are unlikely to be engaged in their work.

 

I hope that explains it a bit better.

PS: Your English is actually very good, you don't use silly made up words like autocraticness.

[GYre0ePJhZ]

I understand your theory, and I do believe that it has explanatory value, but I suspect the reality to be more nuanced though I do not have data to support such a claim.

 

A t-test compares the means of two groups and checks whether they are different to a significant degree (meaning there is 95 % or more probability that the difference is not due to chance alone)(I retracted my analysis in the previous post because this was not the intended use for it when I think about the terms the data were collected)

 

PS: Your English is actually very good, you don't use silly made up words like autocraticness.

 

Thanks!