Journal of Applied Psychology

1977, Vol. 62, No. 1, 16-19

Work Attitudes as Predictors of Attendance on a Specific Day

Frank J. Smith
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Chicago, Illinois

This research examined the relationship between the work attitudes and work
attendance of managerial employees on a specific day in a natural field setting.
The job satisfaction data were obtained from the Index of Organizational Re-
actions (IOR). The primary sample of 3,010 subjects was located in the com-
pany's headquarters building and divided into 27 functional groupings. Since
occasional absenteeism at the managerial level is not subject to financial penalty
and relatively free of social and work-group pressures, it represents behavior
that is generally under the control of the individual employee. Moreover, be-
cause the particular day investigated in the present study followed a crippling
snowstorm, attendance on that day involved considerable effort. The results
show significant relationships between work-related attitudes and attendance on
the specific day studied. These results generally support Herman's point of
view that work attitudes do predict work-related behavior when such behavior
is under the control of the subject.

Past reviews of literature dealing with the
relationship between job satisfaction and such
work-related behavior as job performance,
turnover, and absenteeism have noted the
extreme variation in findings, but have tended
to conclude that job satisfaction and job with-
drawal behavior are inversely related, while
performance has a low and inconsistent rela-
tionship to satisfaction (Brayfield & Crockett,
1955; Herzberg, Mausner, Peterson, &
Capwell, 1957; Katzell, 1957; Porter & Steers,
1973).
The seemingly inconsistent nature of many
of the results has been treated differently by
different investigators. The most frequent
approach involves the attempt to identify
variables that might moderate the perform-
ance-satisfaction relationship and help explain
the previous findings. Examples can be seen in
review by Schwab and Cummings (1970). Still
others have taken a view that performance and
job withdrawal behavior are different phe-
The author would like to thank Charles L. Hulin for
his many helpful suggestions regarding this paper. The
author would also like to thank William Ashley,
Cheryl Johnson, and Barry Raben for their efforts in
collecting much of the data.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Frank J.
Smith, Director, Organizational Surveys, Sears,
Roebuck and Company, Sears Tower, BSC 33-19,
Chicago, Illinois 60684.
16
nomena and that the job satisfaction/job per-
formance relationship is quite different than
that between job satisfaction and job with-
drawal. Lawler and Porter (1967), for example,
argue that while job satisfaction has the power
to influence both absenteeism and turnover, it
can best be seen as being caused by job per-
formance rather than being the cause of it.
Herman (1973), on the other hand, contends
that work attitudes can be seen as predictive
of either type of work-related behavior as long
as such behavior is under the control of indi-
vidual workers. She also points out that many
of the studies relating satisfaction and per-
formance were carried out under situational
constraints that may have so limited perform-
ance variance as to insure low correlational
results.
The present stud)' is in line with Herman's
(1973) reasoning, though it deals with only one
aspect of the discussion, namely, attendance
(the converse of absenteeism). While this work-
related behavior is usually the result of an
individual's decision that is often under his or
her control, it should be noted that even in this
instance a number of conditions exist that often
confound the actual relationship of attendance
to work-related attitudes. For example, the
availability of alternatives to work attendance,
the financial or social penalties associated with
absenteeism, and simply the effort required in
 WORK ATTITUDES AND ATTENDANCE
attending work may all influence the attend-
ance decision but may be relatively unrelated
to attitudes toward work. Because almost all of
the studies reported have been carried out
among hourly paid employees, the influence of
financial penalty for absenteeism has been
present, yet rarely accounted for or even
acknowledged. As Porter and Steers (1973)
have noted, only in the case of permissive ill-
ness pay programs would this penalizing factor
be insignificant. It should also be noted that
absenteeism over any given period is often
relatively slight and is so widely distributed
among employees as to be insignificant.
The present study takes advantage of a
naturally occurring situation, which is par-
ticularly free of some of the confounding con-
ditions mentioned. It also involves behavior
requiring considerable effort. While it examines
the relationship between attitudes and attend-
ance within narrow time periods, it does so in a
situation in which the extent of the behavior
within and its variance across the groups
studied were of sufficient magnitude to be
organizationally significant.
Specifically, the study investigates the re-
lationship between attitudes and attendance
on a particular day among groups of mana-
gerial personnel, all of whom were located in a
single headquarters building of a large mer-
chandising corporation. The observation of
attendance occurred on the day following an
unexpected and severe snowstorm that greatly
hampered the city's transportation system.
Because the storm happened to occur shortly
after a complete organizational survey of the
entire managerial group, it was possible to
relate the work attitudes surveyed to
attendance.
Since occasional absenteeism by managerial
people is not subject to financial penalty and
is relatively free of social and work-group
pressure, it can be viewed as being under the
general control of the individual. Moreover,
attendance following a crippling snowstorm is
unique in that the decision to attend is not only
under individual control but requires con-
siderable personal effort.
It would be predicted, following Herman
(1973), that job satisfaction and job attend-
ance would be positively correlated on the day
following the snowstorm but that on any
17
randomly chosen da}', the correlation would be
low or zero.
Method
The attitude measures used were part of a larger
organizational survey carried out among all members
of the company's headquarters staff. The development
of these scales and their validity is described by Smith
(Note 1), and additional validity data is presented by
Hulin (1966), Dunham (197S), and Dunham and Smith
(in press). Multiple-response items that were designed
to meet the Gxittman criteria and that assess attitudes
toward six work-related areas were measured by the
following scales: Supervision, Kind of Work, Amount
of Work, Career Future and Security, Financial
Rewards, and Company Identification.
Sample
The primary sample consisted of 3,010 salaried em-
ployees in the company's Chicago headquarters build-
ing. Employees performed a mixture of administrative,
professional, and technical functions. All job levels
below that of the president were involved in the study.
A comparison sample consisted of the 340 salaried
members of the company's New York headquarters
office where no storm had occurred. Though the sample
is much smaller in number, the job functions and levels
included in it are practically identical with those in
Chicago.
Procedure
The attitudinal data were collected in November and
December of 1974. Since the survey was administered
anonymously, subjects were identified only in terms of
large functionally related groupings. (The Men's Store,
for example, consisted of a large group of men and
women working in related merchandise departments.)
A total of 27 functional groupings in Chicago and 13 in
New York were used in this study. The sample sizes
within each unit ranged from 59 to 228 in Chicago and
from 28 to 48 in New York.
The attendance data were collected by personnel-
department representatives who were not aware of the
study's design or intent. Since attendance data are not
systematically collected for salaried people, a special
effort was made to determine the extent of, and the
specific reasons for, nonattendance. Moreover, non-
attendance was carefully defined to reflect voluntary
absence on only the day studied. Thus, subjects who
were absent because of out-of-town travel, were on
vacation, or were ill prior to the storm were not counted.
Group-attendance percentages were computed by
dividing the number of people attending by those who
reasonably could have attended on the days in question.
Thus, the measure obtained here was considerably
refined.
For each departmental grouping in Chicago and
New York, the percentage of attendance, as defined,
 18
was computed. The Chicago distribution, the primary
research sample, was unimodul and appeared free of
noticeable skew. The average score for each department
grouping on each of the six attitude scales was also
computed, and Pearson product-moment correlation
coefficients were then computed between these two sets
of data.
The satisfaction and attendance data collected on the
New York sample were for comparison purposes only.
They allow for a comparison prediction of attendance
on what amounts to a random da}'. Since no storms had
occurred in New York on the day studied, no greater
effort was required in attending work than on any other
day and pressures to attend represented the situation
normally encountered.
Results
On April 3, 1975, the day after the storm,
attendance ranged from 97%, to 39% in
Chicago (mdn = 70%). In New York, where no
storm occurred, attendance was much higher,
ranging from 100% to 89% (mdn = 96%).
Table 1 presents the correlational data for
both locations. As can be seen, the storm-
related attendance in Chicago is significantly
correlated with all six attitude measures and,
in the case of three scales, is highly significant.
It should be noted, however, that only the
extreme differences among these correlations
are significant. Thus, the correlation between
attendance and the Career Future scale was
significantly higher than was that between
attendance and cither the Kind of Work or the
Amount of Work scale, £(24) = 2.02, p < .05
(one-tailed); /(2-i) = 1.73, p < .05 (one-
tailed).
While the comparison analysis in the New
York sample is limited by the small sample
Table 1
Correlations Between Job-Satisfaction Levels
and Attendance Levels on- Individual
Days for the Chicago and
New York Groups
Chicago" New Yorkb
(n = 27) (« = 13)
Supervision .54**
A m o u n t of Work .36*
Kind of Work .37*
Financial Rewards .46**
Career Future .60**
Company Identification .42*
* p < .05. one-tailed test.
** t> < .01, one-tailed test.
-1 Group following storm, April 1975.
h
Group, April 1975.
FRANK J. SMITH
(13 department groupings) and the extreme
restriction in range of the attendance rates, the
small variance in attendance does represent a
typical attendance pattern for managers in
these functional units. None of the correlations
is significant. There appears to be no relation-
ship, on a specific day, between attitudes and
attendance.
Discussion
While the situation studied was fortuitous
in nature, it did present an opportunity to
study behavior that was free of several situa-
tional constraints. Within the limitations of the
setting, it does appear that job-related atti-
tudes measures can predict job behavior when
that behavior is substantially under the control
of the employee. This finding is consistent with
the point of view expressed by Herman (1973).
The present results also suggest that the be-
havior predicted should involve considerable
effort and should be of sufficient magnitude to
be worthy of study. Thus, in the present study,
the extent of variation in attendance behavior
(ranging from 39% to 97%) and the effort it
involved were of considerable magnitude for
the Chicago group. For the New York group,
these conditions were lacking, and the attempt
to predict attendance in such a case seems
almost frivolous but was necessary to provide
a baseline.
The findings also indicated that attitudes
toward certain work aspects are significantly
more highly correlated with attendance than
others. This emphasizes the importance of
looking at these scales separately. When viewed
this way, they provide the basis for some in-
sight into the possible specific precursors of
absenteeism.
While the present study is of a one-shot
nature with only a modest chance of realistic
replication, it does point to the value of taking
advantage of naturally occurring events that
offer a glimpse of behavior in which several
.12 obscuring influences have been removed, a con-
.01
.06
dition ordinarily achieved only in laboratory
.11 settings.
.14
,02
Reference Note
1. Smith, F. J. Problems and trends in the operational-
use of employe altitude measurements. Paper pre-
 WORK ATTITUDES AND ATTENDANCE
sented at the 70th Annual Convention of the
American Psychological Association, St. Louis,
Missouri, August 1962.
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19
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Received April 7, 1976 •