SDR Relationships between employee happiness, overtime, sick leave and intention to stay or leave WE WERE INTERESTED in the interactions between employees’ general happiness, the amount of overtime they worked, the amount of sick leave they took and their intention to stay or quit, to inform our coaching practice and management practices more generally. Happiness, or subjective well-being of employees has, not surprisingly, been shown to bring benefits to employers as well as employees and evidence suggests that the happiness is a precondition for good work performance and career success (Boehm & Lyubomirsky, 2008). From the employer’s perspective, overtime may appear to be a means of increasing the productivity of employees. However, in the longer term, persistently working long hours may undermine happiness and well-being. Through producing impaired motivation, chronic fatigue and impairment of health it may, in turn, leads to falling productivity and absenteeism. Absenteeism is a major issue, costing the UK economy over £13.2 billion in 2006 (CBI, 2007). Employees’ loss of a sense of well-being through excessive overtime may also lead to them leaving, at great cost to the organisation that loses the benefits of their skill and experience. Past research has investigated overtime or absenteeism, but these have been related to job satisfaction which is a narrower concept than happiness. Most of this research was done from the employers’ perspective and before measures of well-being were developed. Briefly, early research into the relationship between overtime and job satisfaction yielded equivocal findings. Recently, Wegge et al. (2007) found the relationship to be complex as it depended on employee attitudes and levels of job engagement. While high job satisfaction is associated with fewer days taken off sick by individuals(Lyubomirsky et al., 2005) and low job satisfaction indicates a higher probability of
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Laurel Edmunds & Jessica Pryce-Jones employees leaving (Clark, 2001), the literature on the relationship between absenteeism and overtime is sparse and inconclusive (Brown, 1999). The aim here was to explore these relationships with a context free measure of happiness, and find any interactions between these factors, with contemporary employees, that might guide management practices.
Methodology We carried out two different questionnaire surveys with two groups of respondents. Both groups had a similar composition of respondents who were currently employed and mostly were managerial staff or MBA students. Thus our findings may not be generalisable across other working populations. The first group comprised 127 respondents, 66 (52 per cent) of whom were men. The second group included 193 respondent, of whom 126 (65 per cent) were men. Both groups had similar age profiles (e.g. 40 per cent aged 31–40 years) and ethnicity (80 per cent Caucasian, 15 per cent Asian) profiles. The first questionnaire specifically assessed happiness, overtime, sick leave and intention to stay. The second was broader but included the same key questions. This included the General Happiness Scale (validated by Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999; see Table 1). We used the scores on this scale to divide respondents’ into low, medium or high happiness groups (see Table 2) as a basis for investigating differences related to amount of overtime, sick leave and intention to stay. Overtime was assessed in terms of average hours of overtime per week. In the first questionnaire we also asked if the overtime took place at work or at
Selection & Development Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2008