THE INFLUENCE OF JOB DEMANDS AND JOB-CONT ROL ON HEALTH COMPLAINTS AND ABSENTEEISM

Absenteeism research has been done from different perspectives: psycho logical, sociological and economical. In this article, we describe of absence behavior that integrates these different approaches. In additi on, we report the results of a field study based on the data of 165 wo rkers of a construction company. This study was conducted to examine t he validity of the model and to answer two central research questions: (1) is there a relation between job demands, job control and social s upport and health complaints, feelings of burnout and absenteeism! and (2) how strong is the relation between health complaints measured by a survey and administrative absenteeism data?. Therefore, this article also is a test of the job decision control and decision control suppo rt models. The results confirm the expected relations between job cont rol, job demands, health and absenteeism only partially. We found that health complaints and feelings of tiredness are related with social s upport, job control and the way the labour is organized. In addition, absenteeism is influenced by job content and job-control of employees. However, health complaints explain only 11% of the variance in absent eeism and the work related variables explain the variance in absenteei sm better than health complaints.