The Moderating Role of Regulatory Institutional Environment in the Relationship Between Emotional Job Demands and Employee Absenteeism Likelihood of Healthcare Workers. Evidence From the Low-Income Country Context

Benson Munyenyembe,Ying-Yu Chen,Wen-Chiung Chou

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01052

Benson Munyenyembe, Ying-Yu Chen + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01052

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Abstract

Previous research has not clearly studied how the effects of emotional job demands on absenteeism likelihood are moderated by the contingent absenteeism-related regulatory institutional environments of low-income countries. In this regard, we surveyed 487 healthcare workers in a low-income country in order to test for the effect of emotional job demands on healthcare workers’ absenteeism likelihood. We also explored the mediating role of work engagement and the contingent role of context-specific regulatory institutional environments on the link between emotional job demands and absenteeism likelihood. The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) emotional job demands have a direct positive effect on healthcare workers’ absenteeism likelihood, (2) work engagement plays a mediating role on the link between emotional job demands and healthcare workers’ absenteeism likelihood, and (3) the regulatory institutional environment related to absenteeism moderates the negative link between work engagement and absenteeism likelihood. Results in this study demonstrate the crucial role that the context-specific regulatory institutional environment related to absenteeism plays in suppressing the effect of emotional job demands on absenteeism likelihood when considered through the work-engagement pathway. The study’s findings clarify the mechanism through which emotional job demands affect absenteeism likelihood in a low-income country context. The study thus offers a new refined theoretical perspective on how emotional job demands, work engagement, and context-specific regulatory institutional environments interact in ways that predict absenteeism likelihood.

Highlights

In the low-income country context, the issue of employee absenteeism is of vital significance because it presents one of the major challenges that organizations face
Following the suggestions offered by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) on structural equation modeling (SEM), we used a twostage approach in order to test for our model in AMOS 21
The results show that the interaction term has a statistically significant coefficient (β = −0.081, p < 0.05), implying that regulatory institutional environment has a moderating effect on the negative link between work engagement and absenteeism likelihood

Summary

Introduction

In the low-income country context, the issue of employee absenteeism is of vital significance because it presents one of the major challenges that organizations face. Low-income countries have been characterized by “professional human resource” crises due to the limited availability of adequately trained employed personnel – an issue that underscores the importance of the employeeabsenteeism problem (Belita et al, 2013). Employee absenteeism in the low-income country context is regarded as one of the biggest human-capital risks to productivity-improvement goals (Ejere, 2010). Important to note is that over the past decade, voluminous literature on employee absenteeism has sprung up offering a variety of conceptual models and theories, most of which are constructed from the Anglo-American and Euro-Asian contexts, not low-income country contexts. The scant research has created an ideal opportunity for researchers to systematically document the practices of employee absenteeism in the context of the low-income country (Molleda and Moreno, 2008)

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