WORK-RELATED TARDINESS - LATENESS INCIDENT DISTRIBUTION AND LONG-RANGE CORRELATIONS

The probability distribution of the length of time which is lost to an organization due to an employee being late arrival at work, as well a s the correlation between the time lost in different incidents and on different dates is empirically studied. Computerized arrival records o f the employees in the headquarters of a large industrial firm were us ed. It is shown that the probability of the time lost in a single late arrival follows a power law with an exponent a similar to 1 for laten ess incidents longer than a few minutes but significantly shorter than the duration of a shift. It is also shown that the autocorrelations f or time series composed of lateness incidents of different employees o n different dates show a characteristic 1/f(beta) with beta = 0.55 pow er spectrum. These results are a strong evidence for a kind of ''criti cal dynamics'' underlying the tardiness problem. On the other hand, th e distribution of the total time lost in the organization due to late arrivals on a particular day is Gaussian.