Do Employee Absences Help Managers Evaluate Individual Contributions to Team Production? Evidence from Plant Productivity Data

Subjective performance evaluations and team production both pervade organizations. However, we have little understanding of how supervisors arrive at their subjective evaluations of employee performance when employees produce output in teams. Guided by the causal inference literature, we posit that managers use worker absences to help infer individual contributions to team production. If a team's production improves or declines while a worker is absent, relative to when the worker is present, this pattern may provide managers with important information about the worker’s individual contribution to the team’s performance. We find support for this idea using data from a mid-sized manufacturing firm in the United States. We find that this pattern is stronger in situations where the information provided by absences will be especially valuable for supervisors.