Should I stay or should I go? The role of daily presenteeism as an adaptive response to perform at work despite somatic complaints for employee effectiveness

Our study seeks to contribute to scholarly understanding of the antecedents and consequences of the crucial, but so far overlooked within-person daily fluctuations in presenteeism. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of presenteeism, which conceptualize presenteeism as an adaptive behavior to deliver work performance despite limitations due to ill-health, we develop a within-person model of daily presenteeism and examine somatic complaints and work-goal progress as crucial joint determinants of daily fluctuations in presenteeism. We further integrate the aforementioned theoretical frameworks with ego-depletion theory to argue that presenteeism requires self-regulation to suppress cognitions, emotions, and behavioral responses associated with ill-health and instead focus on completing one’s work tasks. Accordingly, we predict that presenteeism depletes employees’ regulatory resources and impairs employees’ next-day work engagement and task performance. The results of a daily-diary study across 15 workdays with N = 995 daily observations nested in N = 126 employees show that daily work-goal progress attenuates the daily relation between somatic complaints and presenteeism, thereby also reducing the indirect effect of somatic complaints on employees’ next-day work engagement and task performance through presenteeism and ego depletion. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of shifting presenteeism research from the macro to the micro-level.