Working in Discomfort: A review and future research agenda about Presenteeism with specific relevance to Pakistan

Abstract

Medical scholars and consultants in occupational consultancy and epidemiology have been the mainstream researchers to document the correlations between associated productivity loss to certain medical conditions for the employees who use to work while they are ill (Schultz & Edington, 2007). Although presenteeism is costly and a common practice at workplace reflected in a survey conducted among workers belonging to German, Danish and Swedish companies reported that 65 to 78 percent of participants experienced minimum one presenteeism day in last year (Aronsson & Gustafsson, 2005; Hansen & Andersen, 2008; D. Iverson, Lewis, Caputi, & Knospe, 2010; Leineweber, Westerlund, Hagberg, Svedberg, & Alexanderson, 2012) which is twice as much as that of absenteeism approximately (D. Iverson et al., 2010) and causing productivity to decline by 16 percent (Hansen & Andersen, 2008). Hence, the significance of managing presenteeism in comparison to absenteeism is obvious. Though it’s an invisible work practice but with an alarming context of estimated cost of $150 billion in US alone and an increase to $ AU 34.1 (between2009 to 2010) from $AU 25.7 (between 2005 to 2006) billion per year in Australia (Hemp, 2004; Medibank, 2011).