Relationships between work environment factors and presenteeism mediated by employees' health: a preliminary study.

Abstract

This study investigates a research framework for presenteeism, in particular, whether work environment factors are indirectly related to presenteeism via employees' health. A total of 336 employees, 107 from a manufacturing company in Europe and 229 from various locations across North America, completed a self-report survey, which measured the association between presenteeism (dependent variable) and several health and work environment factors (independent variables). These relationships were tested using path analysis with bootstrapping in Mplus. Presenteeism was directly related to health burden (r = 0.77; P = 0.00) and work environment burden (r = 0.34; P = 0.00). The relationship between work environment burden and presenteeism was partially mediated by health burden (β = 0.08; 95% confidence interval, 0.002 to 0.16). These findings suggest both a direct and an indirect relationship between work environment factors and presenteeism at work.