The study of absence from work has been of interest to organizational researchers for over 50 years. Most prior studies have considered absence behavior from the perspective of the individual employee only. The potential effect of a social unit in which an employee works has been given relatively little attention. This study examines the relationship between absence behavior and absence climate at the level of the supervisory group and plant, as well as the level of the individual.

Absence climate was defined as the psychologically meaningful shared perceptions that workers hold concerning absence procedures and practices occurring within an organization. These procedures and practices were categorized into three dimensions, i.e. Organizational Pressure to Attend, Explanations for Absence and Consequences of Absence. In order to assess employee perceptions of absence a questionnaire was administered to 1139 apparel employees, who were members of 46 different work groups embedded within 5 different plants of the same organization. Absence behavior was measured by both absence rate and absence frequency from attendance records over a 12 month period.

This study found (after controlling for gender, age and tenure) that Explanations for Absence was significantly related to absence behavior at the individual level of analysis and that Consequences of Absence was significantly but not practically related to absence behavior at the level of the supervisory group. Hence, only the individual level of analysis was found to be appropriate for the study of absence climate in this study.