An exploration into the degree to which an employee's culture acts as an antecedent to absence behaviour: A conceptual approach

This paper raises the issue of voluntary short-term absence as a culturally informed decision on the part of the employee, drawing upon empirical works such as Hofstede (1984), House et al (2002) and Rhodes and Steers (1978), introducing time as an umbrella term denoting generational influences as being a significant variable, impacting and influencing employee culture to the extent that it may change their work ethic to inform a decision to engage in absence behaviour (Smola and Sutton, 2002). A theoretical model (the etiology of absence model) is offered as a conceptual framework to determine the likelihood of absence behaviour.