Presenteeism at work

"The cost of absenteeism in organizational functioning has been widely acknowledged and extensively examined in the management disciplines of organizational behavior, organizational theory and strategy (Cascio & Boudreau, 2011). Yet, its alleged flip side "presenteeeism" (working while sick) has only recently attracted scholarly attention as a byproduct of organizational restructuring in the wake of the global economic recession, and subsequently as a factor in explaining worsening employee wellbeing, loss productivity, strained team dynamics, hampered implementation of management strategies, and depressed organizational functioning. In the past decade, the rapid advance of digital technologies, i.e. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has facilitated agile working and flexibility, but also fuelled the "always on" culture (McDowall & Kinman, 2017), which may be more potent in Asian societies working in harmony with the social values of diligence. Alongside this global transformation of "work taking over life, any time anywhere", presenteeism may have ceased to be just a work issue: cultural forces, social factors, managerial practices, employees' self-concept, values, motivations, psychological resources will all conspire to make it into a socio-cultural as much as an individual-personal act (of attending work given the circumstance). Unfortunately, the existing work on presenteeism is scattered across a wide range of academic disciplines and under a variety of topics, lacking the coherence and comprehensiveness to address the complexity underlying the phenomenon"--