Teleworking While Sick: A Three-Wave Study of Psychosocial Safety Climate, Psychological Demands, and Presenteeism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in the proportion of employees for whom teleworking became mandatory. Presenteeism, or the behavior of working while ill, has hardly been studied in the context of telework. The pandemic forced millions of workers to abruptly transition to working from home for a prolonged period of time, leaving employers often unaware of their health status or work capacity of the workers. This change also eroded the work experience itself, the workplace, and their protective impact on both individual health and work outcomes. This study focused on the longitudinal relationships among psychosocial safety climate (PSC), a lead indicator of workplace conditions, psychological demands, an indicator of quality of work, and presenteeism among a representative sample of teleworkers. PSC was expected to have an indirect impact on presenteeism with psychological demands as a mediator of this impact. Method: We collected the data from a representative sample of teleworkers in the first months (T1: April, T2: June, and T3: December 2020) of the pandemic using a three-wave online survey ( n = 275). We tested a model of PSC as a determinant of presenteeism in teleworkers with psychological demands as a mediator. A cross-lagged panel model was estimated to test cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships. Findings: As expected, psychological demands increased over time. Contrary to expectations, the prevalence of presenteeism remained unchanged while PSC increased over time. The data fully supported the mediating effect of psychological demands such that a higher evaluation of PSC at T1 led to lower psychological demands at T2, which led to reduced presenteeism at T3. We also found a reciprocal relationship, with higher psychological demands at T2 leading to decreased evaluation of PSC at T3. These results show that the perception of teleworkers on their organization as giving a high priority to their psychological health is an important determinant of their work experience, ultimately influencing their decision to work while ill. The context of the pandemic has highlighted the importance of a positive workplace climate and working conditions for reducing the behaviors that can be harmful to health and productivity. Implications for theory and practice, beyond the pandemic, are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".