L'influence de l'organisation et des conditions de travail sur l'absentéisme. Analyse quantitative et étude de cas

Absenteeism, which has long been overshadowed by the increase of unemployment, has become again a real cause for worry for companies and public states. At this prospect, the analysis of the determining factors of absenteeism arouses a particular interest. This research aims at several objectives: draw up a multidisciplinary state-of-the-art of the literature on absenteeism, devise a research model, test it by means of a quantitative analysis based on the Sumer national survey and a case study carried out in a railway maintenance organization. We have drawn six different approaches of absenteeism from this literature review (economic, societal, individual, organizational, medical and integrative). We have focused on the determining factors connected to work organization, working conditions and job resources. Actually, their explicative power seemed significant though being tested in a rather small number of studies. Therefore we have built an explicative model of absenteeism grounded on the organizational approach while integrating as well mediator variables coming from attitudinal (job satisfaction and intent to stay) and medical (occupational health) approaches. On the basis of the quantitative analysis, we have shown that some organizational variables (such as work density, responsibility level, industrial constraint, absence of job resources, tension with the public), whose influence on absenteeism has never (or hardly ever) been tested before, have a definite effect on absenteeism. Our qualitative study supplements our data analysis since it allows testing our model in a dynamic dimension while analyzing the simultaneous effects of a work reorganization and an improvement of the working conditions (as regards physical strenuousness and work place physical environment). Our study stresses the essential role of work organization, beyond an improvement to the physical environment of the work place or a reduction in the physical strenuousness. The results of quantitative and qualitative analysis allow us to suggest preventive measures to absenteeism for the attention of human resource managers.