Tardiness

Tardiness

Policy and Concept

Tardiness is lateness for work (Blau, 959-970; Koslowsky, Sagie, Krausz, & Singer, 79-88). Employee tardiness is likely to create both direct financial costs to organizations (e.g., decreased time on productive activities) and indirect financial costs (e.g., time lost by coworkers waiting for late colleagues.). Left unchecked, numerous cases of tardiness can lead to a “culture of tardiness” (Koslowsky et al., 79-88) in which employees come to see being late as an acceptable behavior rather than as a deviant one.

Studies of organizational behavior occasionally refer to the phenomenon of employee tardiness-arriving late to work. One of two concerns generally stimulates these references. First, people assume that tardiness is just another type of absenteeism. Alternatively, tardiness is sometimes featured as a separate item by those interested in the better management of human resources. Tardiness is an employee behavior that is important in its own right. It may be a manifestation of growing employee estrangement from work; it may be a form of organizational withdrawal; it may be a response to job-related stress; or it may be stimulated by nonwork factors. When tardiness is viewed in this way, the dearth of theoretical and empirical examinations of the phenomenon assumes serious proportions. The present study represents an attempt to remedy the deficiency through an initial study of tardiness.

Tardiness is conceptualized here as one of several possible manifestations of employee withdrawal. Theoretical connection between tardiness and withdrawal has been suggested by Human Resource Management officers. For example, Leigh & Lust (1988) argued that withdrawal, a failure to participate, may be conceptualized as a continuum of behavior with job application avoidance at one end, ranging through tardiness, poor job performance, absenteeism, and finally, termination. (Leigh & Lust, 78-95) Other writers to discuss tardiness explicitly as part of employee withdrawal include Beehr and Gupta (1978). Many researchers have simply incorporated tardiness into their measures of absenteeism. Only a few theoretical explanations for the inclusion of tardiness within the withdrawal rubric have been offered. Rosse (1988) discussed the “lateness conversion” hypothesis: that the presence of financial or punitive disincentives to tardiness encourages the conversion of lateness tendencies to absenteeism. (Rosse, 517-531) Other authors have posed more comprehensive arguments for considering tardiness a manifestation of withdrawal.

Problem Description

Benson & Pond (1987) stated that tardiness behaviors may vary along a severity continuum, with alienation withdrawal and at the lower end, and chronic absenteeism and voluntary turnover located at the higher. (Benson, & Pond, 218-229) A similar argument was also offered by Blau (1994). The situation becomes more ambiguous when the empirical results regarding the association between tardiness and other withdrawal forms are examined. Not only is evidence on the issue sparse, but it is contradictory as well. Some studies report positive relationships between tardiness and absenteeism, or that the two variables follow similar patterns. Hanisch & Hulin (1990) also reported that there was stability across years in each measure of withdrawal (tardiness and absenteeism), and that the relationships of withdrawal behaviors to one another were consistent from ...