Differential Effects of Challenging and Hindering Job Demands on Stress-Related Presenteeism and Outcomes: Can Psychological Capital and Mindfulness be Successful Interventions to undo the Harm?

Abstract

For many decades, organization research scholars have been trying to find answers as to why individuals behave in a certain way at work and what consequences it can have for the individual and the organizations. In their quest for finding answers to such questions, they have mostly studied a variety of behaviours and also observed reasons for why people absent themselves from work (absenteeism) or chose to come to work (presenteeism) in spite of certain conditions when they shouldn’t do so. While a plethora of research is available on understanding the meanings and reasons of absenteeism, still its counterpart presenteeism does not enjoy the same attention of organizational scholars and has been limited to the attention of medical researchers and practitioners due to its narrowly defined nomenclature of ‘coming to work while ill’. An intriguing question here would be if people can absent themselves for all sorts of reasons other than health related and absenteeism can manifest into different meanings at the workplace, then presenteeism can also be due to different reasons and can have different meanings.

Today’s work environment is dynamic and the challenges faced by individuals in contemporary organizations are countless; be it changing information technology, fierce competition at both local, national and global level, the shift in the paradigm of business from product oriented to service oriented, demographics changes, the changing nature of internal organizational structures and even the traditional understanding of a job as a set of fixed tasks. At the heart of all such changes is the individual who has to put in all efforts to meet organization sumptuous expectations of maximum productivity and long term success which has apparently little interest in an individual’s well-being. These challenges create stress for the individuals, they chose to be present at work but their mental energies are not focused on the task at hand and they are distracted. This type of psychological strain has been conceptualised by certain researchers as stress-related presenteeism. Though research on presenteeism has been overwhelmed by sickness-related presenteeism, researchers have started to raise important concerns about the understanding of sickness related presenteeism and how it can be measured. This study therefore, employed stress-related presenteeism which is an understudied construct and more relevant to the context of Pakistan which has a collectivist culture where there are strong norms of reciprocity, social bindings, and citizenship pressures due to which individuals may feel more pressures, thereby creating stress which can lead to distraction at work and can have devastative effects on their well-being.

The field of presenteeism is quite a theoretical. Lack of theory is an important challenge while studying presenteeism. Most studies on the different types of presenteeism have used the job demands resource theory to explain how presenteeism manifests at the workplace where job demands have been seen as a crucial antecedent of presenteeism. The most popular model by Gary Johns also explicates that job demands can lead to presenteeism at the work place. Keeping in line with this theorizing, the current study used the Job Demands-resource (JD-R) model and the conservation of resource theory to investigate the differential effects of challenging (workload) and hindering (emotional demands and, cognitive load) job demands on stress-related presenteeism and outcomes (psychological well-being and procrastination).

In an attempt to investigate how individuals can cope with stress-related presenteeism, individual personal resources of psychological capital and mindfulness were also included as moderating variables. Data was collected at two time waves from 298 employees of the banking industry of Pakistan. For analysis of data, stepwise regression analysis in SPSS and bootstrapping mediation analysis techniques were used.The results of this study confirmed the relationship between workload and cognitive demands with stress-related presenteeism. However, no support was found for emotional demands. As proposed, the findings also supported the moderating role of psychological capital and mindfulness on cognitive job demands and not on emotional job demands. In the end, results of the study have been explained based on past literature and theory and also practical implications for managers have been discussed at the end.