Personal Blogs

Bayes’ application to HRM is limited to event probability but is a topic that is mentioned in passing in a paper on shirking and presenteeism by S. Brown (2004) recommended by Dr. Andrew Bryce (Sheffield), which was written over 20 years ago this year.

Brown (2004) reads as follows:

“Such ‘shirking’ is potentially costly to firms and may incite them to undertake monitoring. BST** envisage a monitoring technology in which there is some probability, α < 1, of each absentee’s true state of health being revealed to the firm.”

After deciding to initiate a brief scoping review for the B812 literature topic of choice (‘Wellbeing’). I thought I would check in with the blog and provide some justification and background for this choice of theme.

This spurious love affair with Bayes’ theorem has loomed over my educational learnings but only in its form as sub-game perfect in non-cooperative game theory. Big thanks to Melvyn Coles, Pierre Regibeau, and Franco Squintani for their lectures and classes from our days in Colchester on Economics. 

I started the HRM course in Nov 2023 and while I am still somewhat aware of some concepts surrounding Bayes, things have changed. Nowadays, Bayes’ theorem (10+ years on) is being used in combination with what we call supervised learning and algorithmic techniques such as neural networks.

So, how do we proceed? Perhaps, it is wise to proceed with caution. A brief scoping review will get me up to speed and updated with new research as much as is feasibly possible.

References

Brown, S. and Sessions, John (2004) “Absenteeism, Presenteeism and Shirking”, Economic Issues, 9(1), pp. 15-22 – Available at: https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eisarticl/104brown.htm (Accessed on 13 March 2024)

**Barmby, T. A., Sessions, J. G. and Treble, J. G. (1994) “Absenteeism, Efficiency Wages and Shirking”, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 94(4), pp. 561-566 – Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3440797 (Accessed on 13 March 2024)

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This post was written by Alfred Anate Mayaki, a student on the MSc in HRM, and was inspired by the author's previous learnings and experiences.

Not long before I joined the MSc in HRM, I was between program options. My research into what would be my third degree had led me to HRM as a viable route into a postdoctoral role. While considering my options with a skip in my step and a huge bout of consummate optimism, I without hesitation applied to graduate admissions at The London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) for what was meant to be a 1+3 (MRes + PhD in Employee Relations and Human Resources) - this was in late July by the way - this application ended up being for an MSc in Economics and Management, mainly due to the fact that a hard deadline for the 1+3 program had just elapsed. My only option was to apply for another Uni at short notice or defer my interest until the next academic year.

University application processes are strange things because you can't really apply everywhere, you have enough time and energy to engage in a limited number of applications. Having realised that I had spent the best part of £80 GBP - the set fee that LSE charges for the privilege of tendering its application process, chased multiple academic references for the best part of a month and produced a compelling supporting statement for what turned out to be nothing whatsoever, I decided to channel my efforts towards this distance learning program instead of LSE’s ERHR, maintaining all the prior graft I had accumulated for postdoctoral research.

Considering productivity and well-being in the literature

Whilst in a sort of quasi-transition between these two programs, I uncovered an interesting article by the team at MorganAsh. Now, I don’t wish to be too complimentary to the entire paper, but in the article, the company through its Director, Andrew Gething, speaks eloquently about Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) and absenteeism in the context of Financial Services. Whilst conducting research on this article, I came across and shared something that popped up in my academic inbox about a term called ‘presenteeism’ a few days ago courtesy of People Management magazine.

To explain, I recently wrote an article on microeconomic wage bargaining which uncovered the effect of shirking on wages. Presenteeism is essentially an extension of the shirking principle. The Brown and Sessions model is interesting because it is cited by Andrew Bryce in his paper which is perhaps the second most authoritative in the literature. Having retweeted Dr. Bryce’s post on X about his paper, which was subsequently the subject of a few exchanges between ourselves via e-mail, it was important for me to draw inferences from this duality to bring closure to my convictions. I, for one, believe that HR professionals must resolve the landscape of factors influencing dysfunctional presenteeism in practice either through soft or hard means. More on this later.

Life is a funny ol’ thing. It would almost certainly have never crossed my mind that, even with my rich vein of experience in HR, I would have stumbled across such valuable a concept as presenteeism and leavism, so early on in my respective journey.

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This post was written by Alfred Anate Mayaki, a student on the MSc in HRM, and was inspired by the work of Mark L. Bryan, Jennifer Roberts, and Andrew M. Bryce (2022) in an article entitled, “Dysfunctional Presenteeism: Effects of physical and mental health on work performance”.