CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1     Background to the Study
Organizations over the years have sought means of improving employee resource management particular with the interest of reducing the employee work absenteeism and to maintain low level of employee turnover in manufacturing industry. Employee motivation, shift work system, team work and other means of enhancing employee happiness and job satisfaction have been applied by management to reduce employee absenteeism and labour turnover to improve overall organizational performance. However, despite the awareness of the adverse effect of absenteeism on overall organizational productivity and performance, the level of absenteeism tend to remain high in Nigerian, especially in the public sector.
Cascio (2003), defined absenteeism as any failure of an employee to report for or remain at work as scheduled, regardless of reason, expresses a monitory implication. The term ‘as scheduled’ is every significant, for this automatically excludes vacations, holidays, jury duty and the like. It also eliminates the problem of determining whether the absenteeism is excusable or not. Medically verified illness is a good example. From a business perspective, the employee is absent and is simply not available to perform his or her job, which means the absenteeism will cost money.Tiwari (2014) defined absenteeism as absence of workers from the regular work without prior permission. Excessive absenteeism involves a considerable loss to the enterprise because work scheduled are upset and delayed and management has to give overtime wages to meet the delivery dates. The rates of overtime wages are doubled than the normal rates of wages. Therefore, study of cause of absenteeism is essential to deal with the problm.Ivancevich and Matteson (2004) were of the view that absenteeism is costly because it reduces output and is disruptive because it requires that schedules and programmes be modified. Van der Merwe (2008) also establishes a relationship between absenteeism and labour turnover in that they share withdrawal behaviour where with absenteeism the behaviour is temporal and permanent with labour turnover.