Lack of Consequences or Rewards

Lateness is more likely to occur without written and verbal policies that threaten to lower pay or terminate perpetually tardy employees. Letting employees get away tardiness can result in chronic lateness and encourage other employees to be late. However, a company with a punctual culture discourages employee tardiness: Employees come to work on time to avoid being labeled as unreliable or lazy. Rewards for promptness create incentives for employees to arrive on time. However, if bosses offer no rewards, employees may believe punctuality is not important or acknowledged.

Dissatisfaction with the Company

Stress from heavy workloads, low pay, tough demands and poor treatment can lower morale. Employees with low morale are more likely to subconsciously delay coming to work, and adverse conditions at work can push employees away from work. Employees who feel helpless and angry may use tardiness to show their discontent or passively punish their company. If employees do not like their job or company, they are less likely to put in the effort to be on time or to care about how their actions affect the company.

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Busyness

It's difficult for some employees to juggle work duties and life demands. James J. Bardsley and Susan R. Rhodes, authors of "Framework to Identify Correlates of Employee Lateness," reveal that employees with young children are more prone to lateness. Dealing with their children's sickness, preparing their children for day care or school in the mornings and trying to secure child care create barriers to punctuality. In other instances, long work hours leave little time for workers to handle responsibilities outside of work or rest. Employees may begin oversleeping after a series of long and strenuous work days. In addition to the busyness, many employees underestimate the time needed to prepare for work. These factors can lead to tardiness.

Confidence in Job Security

Upper-level management and highly skilled employees may feel less pressure to avoid tardiness. High-level managers are usually less accountable to other employees and are powerful enough to avoid punishment for tardiness. In her book "Never Be Late Again: 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged," Diana DeLonzor writes that most employees are too hesitant to approach their boss about being late; therefore, bosses may continue their behavior without any threat to their job security or challenge from others. Employees with notable skills, rare talents or social influence may develop a mindset that encourages lateness, especially if the employee has job offers from other companies and his current employer is reluctant to fire to him.

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What Are the Causes of Tardiness Among Employees?

By Dianne Heath, eHow Contributor

Diane Heath e-how contributor

Lateness is a habit that seems trivial; however, its effects on a company can be costly.

Gini Graham Scott, author of "A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell," notes that employee tardiness can "delay production if you're a manufacturing company, create customer problems if you're in retail, and trigger morale problems for the staff who come in on time." Lateness reduces employee productivity, which decreases profit for your business. CNET reports that this behavior costs an estimated $3 billion annually in lost productivity for U.S. businesses.

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Family Responsibilities and Absenteeism: Employees Caring for Parents versus Employees Caring for Children
By Boise, Linda; Neal, Margaret B. Academic journal article from Journal of Managerial Issues, Vol. 8, No. 2

Beginning of article
Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in the impact of employees' family responsibilities on absenteeism. Having children has been found in a long tradition of research to increase employee absenteeism (e.g., Allen, 1980; Emlen and Koren, 1984; Klein, 1986). More recently, attention has been focused on the impact of elder or adult care responsibilities on absenteeism. Employees with these types of informal caregiving duties have also been found to have greater absenteeism than employees without such responsibilities (see, for example, reviews by Barr et al. (1992), Neal et al. (1993), and Wagner et al. (1989)). Whether caregiving for elders has a greater or lesser impact on employee absenteeism than caring for children is an important human resource management issue for the coming decade as an increasing proportion of employees move into middle age, the prime parent caregiving years. In this article, we compare the absenteeism rates and characteristics of employees caring for parents and those caring for young or disabled children and investigate the factors associated with absenteeism for the two caregiver groups. While there are other forms of caregiving which affect employees (e.g., for disabled younger adults or for nonparent elders), in this article we focus on the two most prevalent forms of familial caregiving, as these affect the greatest number of employees, and they represent two fundamental intergenerational relationships for which society ascribes an obligation to provide care in times of need. The next section overviews prior research in this area, including our conceptual framework. We then describe our research questions and hypotheses, methodology, and results. Finally, we present our conclusions and their managerial implications.

PRIOR RESEARCH Much of the research on employees and their family responsibilities has roots in role theory and the associated concept of role strain. Pearlin points out that "it is around daily and enduring roles such as breadwinning and work or marriage and parenthood that much of our lives are structured through time" (1983: 4). According to role theory, the various roles held by an individual may compete and potentially conflict with each other. Voydanoff and Kelly (1984) investigated two potential forms of role strain for employees with children: "overload," which is used to refer to an excess of overall responsibilities, and "interference," which occurs when multiple roles require one to be in more than one place at a time. While these researchers did not measure absenteeism, they did investigate time conflicts resulting from these forms of role strain. Conceptually, we believe there is a close link between role strain and absenteeism through the concept of time conflict. In the conceptual framework utilized in this study, therefore, absenteeism is viewed as a potential behavioral outcome of conflict between the competing time demands of one's job and one's family responsibilities. Absenteeism may occur when (a) there is role interference, that is, where the obligations to one's family interfere with one's job schedule, or (b) there is role overload, as when the amount of responsibility for both job and family exceeds available hours. Prior research has revealed a number of factors that may affect absenteeism among employees who are caregivers, including employees' personal characteristics, caregiving demand variables, and resources. Personal characteristics which may affect work attendance include gender (Emlen and Koren, 1984; Klein, 1986; Stoller, 1983; Stone et al., 1987; VandenHeuvel and Wooden, 1995), age (Gellatly, 1995; Nicholson et al., 1977; Stone et al., 1987), ethnic status (Dilts et al., 1985), occupation (Klein, 1986; Porter and Steers, 1973), and number of years on the job (Gellatly, 1995; Nicholson and Goodge, 1976). Caregiving demands, or the characteristics of the person(s) being cared for and of the caregiving situation, are also important. Previous studies have found that employees with young children (Crouter, 1984; Emlen and Koren, 1984; Klein, 1986) or with a large number of children (Allen, 1980) tend to have increased absenteeism. As children with disabilities have higher than average rates of physician visits, hospitalizations, and absences from school (Salkever, 1985), employees with a disabled child may also experience increased absenteeism. Research on employees with informal elder care responsibilities has focused on stress as well as work interference and absenteeism. Predictor variables include coresidence with the elder (Enright and Friss, 1987), residence in a nursing home (negatively related to stress) (Enright and Friss, 1987), type of impairment (Scharlach and Fredriksen, 1994), number of caregiving tasks performed (Gibeau and Anastas, 1989), and hours of assistance given (Scharlach and Fredriksen, 1994).

Resources available to employees may be conceptualized as factors either within or outside of the workplace which may reduce role conflict between job and family responsibilities. As such, they can be expected to reduce absenteeism. Resources outside the workplace include adequate income (Belle, 1982; Horowitz, 1985), adequate care arrangements (Emlen and Koren, 1984; Louv, 1992) and the availability of others to help with caregiving responsibilities (Angel and Tienda, 1982; Brody et al., 1994; Emlen, 1987). Factors within the workplace may also reduce the interference between job and family commitments, thereby reducing absenteeism. These include flexible work hours (Friedman, 1987; Gibeau et al., 1986; Hewlett et al., 1986), supportive personnel policies (Gibeau et al., 1986; Wagner and Hunt, 1994), and working part-time (Jackofsky and Peters, 1987). CURRENT STUDY Factors Affecting Absenteeism This study explores the impact on employees' absenteeism of family responsibilities for care of children and for care of parents. Four kinds of absenteeism, or time lost from work, are considered as outcomes in this study: days missed, tardiness, times left early or during the day, and interruptions at work. Most studies of absenteeism are limited to measures of the number of days missed and/or the incidence of tardiness. However, studies of employees with children (e.g., Emlen and Koren, 1984) suggest that other forms of time lost from work, such as leaving work early or being interrupted during the work day to deal with family-related matters, may occur as frequently or more often, making them at least as important a form of absence to measure as missing an entire day. Furthermore, most previous studies of absenteeism have utilized data in company attendance records, which do not include all incidents of absence, particularly for employees in professional or management positions, who have more flexibility in their work schedule, or for employees who arrange time off informally with their supervisor. In relying on employees' selfreports of four kinds of absenteeism, the study reported on here has the advantage of tapping forms of absenteeism, including interruptions at work, which may be particularly affected by caregiving responsibilities and which are not reported in most absenteeism studies. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES Two research questions are addressed in this study. The first is: "How do caregivers of parents and caregivers of children compare with respect to the kinds and degrees of absenteeism. they