Development and validation of a measure of an individual’s lateness attitude

Abstract

The authors developed and validated a measure of employees’ attitudes toward lateness at work. Analyses provided clear evidence of the reliability and validity of the new measure. Specifically, high reliabilities were observed in both student (α = .82) and employee (α = .84) samples. Using objective lateness data from organizations, the measure significantly predicted two lateness behaviors, lateness frequency (r = .25, p < .01) and duration (r = .24, p. < .01), over a six-month period. Most importantly, lateness attitude improved prediction of lateness behavior above and beyond prediction made with only general job attitudes and conscientiousness.

Introduction

Organizations and researchers alike have focused much effort on understanding and implementing ways of increasing productivity while decreasing costs. One such area of concern is reducing withdrawal behaviors such as absenteeism, turnover, and lateness which have multiple associated costs including higher accident rates (Goodman & Garber, 1988), disrupted work schedules, decreased productivity (Cascio, 1991), and high employee replacement costs (Argote et al., 1995, Sheehan, 1993). Sagie, Birati, and Tziner (2002) estimate both direct and indirect costs of employee lateness to be 737 dollars per employee per year.

The current study focuses on lateness, a type of withdrawal behavior that has not received as much research attention as absenteeism and turnover (Bardsley and Rhodes, 1996, Blau, 1995). This deficiency in the literature is unfortunate for several reasons. First, being late to work is inherently costly to organizations in terms of loss of late employee productivity, supervisors’ lost time due to disciplining late employees and rearranging work schedules to meet productivity goals, and the negative impact of lateness on other workers who must make up for the late employee’s work (Blau, 1994). Koslowsky, Sagie, Krausz, and Dolman-Singer (1997) found a negative correlation (−.21) between performance and lateness, indicating that late employees may be low performers. The morale and work motivation of colleagues are likely to deteriorate when some employees are tardy (Jamal, 1984). And, with the rise in importance of teamwork, an individual’s lateness behavior impacts on the entire team’s performance. Importantly, there are also effects of lateness on individuals, in both financial and non-financial forms (Sagie et al., 2002). The financial impact includes loss of job and income; the non-financial includes the associated negative emotions and diminished social contacts and relationships at work. As well, this can negatively impact job performance and satisfaction (Schriber & Gutek, 1987). Discovering the antecedents of lateness behavior may help organizations and individual employees.

The influences on lateness behavior are multifaceted. Culture likely plays a strong role in determining peoples’ views of timeliness. Through socialization, people adopt cultural norms regarding behavior (Brislin & Kim, 2003). Manrai and Manrai (1995) demonstrated differences in Western versus Middle East cultures in people’s concepts of work time and leisure time. Levine, West, and Reis (1980) found public clocks and individual’s watches were less accurate in Brazil than in America. They also found Brazilians were less accurate than Americans in estimating time and more flexible in their definitions of early and late. Thus, people may have very different reasons for lateness, depending on their adoption of cultural norms. In general, people from developing economies, who do not arrive precisely at a specified time may simply be acting appropriately within a more flexible conceptualization of time, where people finish events fully before moving on to other events rather than following set schedules (Brislin & Kim, 2003). Alternatively, people who are more acculturated into a Western view of time include people from more developed countries such as Western Europe, East Asia, Australia, and North America. For individuals with a Western view, lateness may be an indication of job withdrawal. This is consistent with the increasing evidence for the progression theory of employee withdrawal (Koslowsky et al., 1997), with what appear to be “less severe” forms of withdrawal such as lateness serving as precursors to “more severe” forms of withdrawal such as absenteeism and turnover.

In addition to culture, personality may play an important role in lateness behavior. Blau (1994) argued that the need to be punctual may be an underlying personality construct that influences behavior. This need for punctuality or time urgency is a main component of the Type A behavioral pattern (Dishon-Berkovits & Koslowsky, 2002). Further, the potential role of conscientiousness in lateness behavior has been discussed (Koslowsky, 2000) and examined empirically (Ashton, 1998). Polychronicity is another individual difference variable that has been found to be related to lateness for train operators (r = .19; Conte & Jacobs, 2003). Polychronicity is the extent to which individuals prefer to be engaged in more than one task simultaneously and the extent to which individuals believe this preference is the best way to do things. Cotte and Ratneshwar (1999) note cultures are not homogeneous with respect to polychronicity. Rather, polychronicity is conceptualized at both a national culture level and an individual level. Benabou (1999) found people with high polychronicity were less likely to want to work for companies that emphasized punctuality, schedules, and deadlines. Thus, a person’s culture and individual difference variables such as conscientiousness and general job attitudes (as discussed below) should be effective predictors of lateness behavior.

A better understanding of lateness behavior can help improve the vocational counseling process. For example, helping individuals become aware of their attitudes and preferences regarding timeliness at work can be beneficial in choosing appropriate careers. Individuals can think about these preferences in relation to job requirements and be able to make more informed and more effective decisions regarding person–work environment fit (Holland, 1997). This aligns with the Lofquist and Dawis (1975) theory of work adjustment that addresses the mutual ability of workers and the work environment to meet each other’s requirements. In addition to the benefits for the individual, understanding and better predicting lateness can also benefit organizations by allowing them to identify potential lateness perpetrators, intervene early, and prevent more progressive forms of withdrawal from happening. To this end, the authors developed a measure of attitudes toward lateness that should better predict lateness behavior, thus benefiting both organizations and individual employees in various ways.

Previous studies of lateness behavior have assessed traditional, general attitudes about one’s job as antecedents to lateness and found conflicting results. Specifically, studies examining job satisfaction and lateness found correlations ranging from negative .28 to positive .44 with several studies finding non-significant relationships (Adler and Golan, 1981, Bardsley and Rhodes, 1996, Koslowsky et al., 1997, Lau et al., 2003). When job involvement was studied as the antecedent, Blau (1994) found correlations ranging from −.10 to −.38 whereas Bardsley and Rhodes (1996) found a non-significant correlation of .02. Finally, the Koslowsky et al. (1997) meta-analysis found the relationship between organizational commitment and lateness to be −.29, whereas Jamal (1984) found a correlation of only .05. These inconsistent findings point to the need for further studies to clearly understand the relationship of these important work attitudes and lateness behavior or the development of better measures to serve as predictors of lateness behavior.

In addition to revealing inconsistent relationships, these past studies explained a limited proportion of lateness variance. In retrospect, this is not surprising when viewed from Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1977) framework regarding attitude–behavior relationships. Specifically, for a strong relationship between an attitude and behavior to be found, a high correspondence between the two is necessary. As such, traditional general attitude measures (i.e., job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment) should not be expected to strongly predict a specific behavior such as lateness because of the lack of correspondence between the attitudinal predictor and the behavioral criterion. Rather than these general attitudes, a specific attitude toward lateness should more adequately predict lateness behavior.

In line with Ajzen and Fishbein, 1977, Steers and Rhodes, 1978 highlight the importance of having a specific attitude influencing a specific behavior. Their theoretical process model of attendance proposed that a general job attitude (satisfaction with the job situation) indirectly affects a job behavior (employee attendance) through a more specific intervening variable (attendance motivation). Together, these two models serve as the foundation for our development of a measure of an individual’s lateness attitude, with the expectation that it will more adequately predict actual lateness behavior.

There exists no validated measure of lateness attitude in the literature. Bardsley and Rhodes (1996) have used a measure of the motivation to be on time, but there is no real empirical record for this measure or for its development. Therefore, we took a comprehensive approach in creating a measure to better understand and predict lateness behavior. Our new measure of lateness attitude refers to an individual’s specific affective and cognitive responses to being late to work. This construct definition is further delineated in the measure development section of this paper.

A content validation approach was used to construct the measure. We then examined the relationship of the new measure with other constructs in the nomological net, specifically general job attitudes, an individual difference variable, and lateness behavior. In this way, we gathered preliminary evidence of construct validity. A second study was conducted to provide an initial examination of criterion-related validity by assessing the ability of the lateness attitude measure to predict lateness behavior above and beyond general attitude measures.