Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: During uncertain, challenging, and often painful times in their lives, millions of employees in the United States take a leave of absence from work each year to navigate a personal medical issue. Despite its prevalence, medical leave is typically overlooked in the management literature, with most literature on the work-life interface focusing on family commitments and parental leave. However, the theoretical underpinnings of research on parental leave may not be applicable to medical leave, as medical leave is often unpredictable in timing and length, involuntary, and stigma-prone. It could also raise questions about whether the employee has the strength to continue, as work norms often equate suffering with weakness or incompetence. Through a multi-method and multi-source design, I explore the experience of taking medical leave, the various ways managers respond to these experiences, and implications of these responses. First, I employ a qualitative grounded theory approach to explore the lived experiences of employees who have taken medical leave using interviews from 42 individuals— 29 who took medical leave and 13 who work as leave coordinators or advocates and serve as first-hand witnesses to this phenomenon. Next, I explore one type of managerial response in greater detail: leave retaliation. I first explore the prevalence of leave retaliation in the United States through analyses of archival legal data. Then, drawing upon my qualitative findings and uncertainty reduction theory, I examine how managers perceive medical leave to generate uncertainty in their work environment, and in turn are motivated to reduce that uncertainty via retaliation. Relying on data from 1,145 managers across four experiments, I test the indirect effect of medical leave on leave retaliation intentions through perceptions of uncertainty and examine manager characteristics and contextual factors that may make this more likely (lack of resilience, work devotion schema internalization, and task interdependence). In summary, this multi-perspective, multi-method dissertation contributes to scholarly work on the work-life interface, employee suffering, and compassion at work. By highlighting the mechanisms underlying a theoretically relevant, yet previously overlooked phenomenon, I hope this research can help mitigate negative reactionary behavior, foster compassion, and ultimately reduce undue employee suffering.
Author: Barnes, Liza Y.
Institution: University of Michigan
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7113277505