Family Responsibilities and Absenteeism: Employees Caring for Parents versus Employees Caring for Children

Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in the impact of employees' family responsibilities on absenteeism. Having children has been found in a long tradition of research to increase employee absenteeism (e.g., Allen, 1980; Emlen and Koren, 1984; Klein, 1986). More recently, attention has been focused on the impact of elder or adult care responsibilities on absenteeism. Employees with these types of informal caregiving duties have also been found to have greater absenteeism than employees without such responsibilities (see, for example, reviews by Barr et al. (1992), Neal et al. (1993), and Wagner et al. (1989)). Whether caregiving for elders has a greater or lesser impact on employee absenteeism than caring for children is an important human resource management issue for the coming decade as an increasing proportion of employees move into middle age, the prime parent caregiving years. In this article, we compare the absenteeism rates and characteristics of employees caring for parents and those caring for young or disabled children and investigate the factors associated with absenteeism for the two caregiver groups. While there are other forms of caregiving which affect employees (e.g., for disabled younger adults or for nonparent elders), in this article we focus on the two most prevalent forms of familial caregiving, as these affect the greatest number of employees, and they represent two fundamental intergenerational relationships for which society ascribes an obligation to provide care in times of need. The next section overviews prior research in this area, including our conceptual framework. We then describe our research questions and hypotheses, methodology, and results. Finally, we present our conclusions and their managerial implications. PRIOR RESEARCH Much of the research on employees and their family responsibilities has roots in role theory and the associated concept of role strain. Pearlin points out that "it is around daily and enduring roles such as breadwinning and work or marriage and parenthood that much of our lives are structured through time" (1983: 4). According to role theory, the various roles held by an individual may compete and potentially conflict with each other. Voydanoff and Kelly (1984) investigated two potential forms of role strain for employees with children: "overload," which is used to refer to an excess of overall responsibilities, and "interference," which occurs when multiple roles require one to be in more than one place at a time. While these researchers did not measure absenteeism, they did investigate time conflicts resulting from these forms of role strain. Conceptually, we believe there is a close link between role strain and absenteeism through the concept of time conflict. In the conceptual framework utilized in this study, therefore, absenteeism is viewed as a potential behavioral outcome of conflict between the competing time demands of one's job and one's family responsibilities. Absenteeism may occur when (a) there is role interference, that is, where the obligations to one's family interfere with one's job schedule, or (b) there is role overload, as when the amount of responsibility for both job and family exceeds available hours. Prior research has revealed a number of factors that may affect absenteeism among employees who are caregivers, including employees' personal characteristics, caregiving demand variables, and resources. Personal characteristics which may affect work attendance include gender (Emlen and Koren, 1984; Klein, 1986; Stoller, 1983; Stone et al., 1987; VandenHeuvel and Wooden, 1995), age (Gellatly, 1995; Nicholson et al., 1977; Stone et al., 1987), ethnic status (Dilts et al., 1985), occupation (Klein, 1986; Porter and Steers, 1973), and number of years on the job (Gellatly, 1995; Nicholson and Goodge, 1976). Caregiving demands, or the characteristics of the person(s) being cared for and of the caregiving situation, are also important. …