From relation to intervention: how supervisors’ health-focused intervention behavior relates to employees’ sickness absenteeism

Sickness absenteeism represents a pressing challenge for employees, organizations, and societies. Although leadership is widely recognized as a determinant of employees’ health, the relationship between leaders’ Health-Focused Intervention Behavior (HFIB) and sickness absenteeism remains insufficiently understood. HFIB denotes leaders’ purposeful actions to support employees’ recovery, such as initiating health-related dialogue, adapting work conditions, and facilitating access to organizational and medical resources in case of ill-health. Grounded in Conservation of Resources theory, this research pursues three objectives: (1) to examine absenteeism as a theoretically and practically significant outcome of HFIB above and beyond (leader-member exchange) LMX, (2) to investigate pre-existing health impairments as an underexplored boundary condition shaping HFIB effectiveness, and (3) to explore the longitudinal development of sickness absenteeism trajectories by assessing individual differences in initial absenteeism (intercept) and change over time (slope) in relation to HFIB. Drawing on multi-source data collected over 18 months, including six waves of sickness absenteeism following the baseline survey, we find that HFIB is negatively associated with sickness absenteeism, even after controlling for LMX, physical strain and respiratory diseases. Moreover, impairment severity moderates this relationship: contrary to expectations, employees with stronger impairments exhibit smaller reductions in sickness absenteeism than those with less severe impairments.