Reform Stress in the Public Sector? Linking Change Diversity to Turnover Intentions and Presenteeism Among Civil Servants Using a Matching Approach

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the effect of having experienced diverse changes over a short period of time on the turnover intent and presenteeism behavior of public sector employees. Identifying such effect has been difficult since extant research often defined and studied organizational changes as single, isolated events. Consequently, they may have failed to capture how different changes interact with one another, and what cumulative impact diverse changes have on employees. We introduce nonparametric matching, using data from the Australian Public Service, allowing us to overcome the challenge of distinguishing between the effect of change diversity and that of preexisting problems. Results show both turnover intent and presenteeism increase in organizations with high change diversity. This suggests that employees perform emotion-focused (turnover intent) and problem-focused (presenteeism) coping when faced with high change diversity, and points at the need for sufficient recovery time in between changes.