Does Job Satisfaction Take a Hit? The Relationships Between Employee Cannabis Use, Job Satisfaction, and Absenteeism

Despite the frequency of cannabis use, limited research has examined how employees’ cannabis use relates to job attitudes and behaviors. This study responds to calls to examine the effects of employee cannabis use on work-relevant outcomes by exploring how employee cannabis use relates to job satisfaction and voluntary absenteeism by analyzing a sample of 526 employed young adults from the most recent three waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) Child and Young Adult Cohort. Through estimating cross-lagged panel models, this study clarifies the direction of relationships between employee cannabis use and job satisfaction, and how these relate to subsequent absenteeism. The results supported that the normal causality model of cannabis use predicting subsequent job satisfaction was the best-fitting and most parsimonious model, though job satisfaction did not mediate the relationship between cannabis use and absenteeism. Supplemental analyses indicated that sex moderated the effect of cannabis use on subsequent job satisfaction. Specifically, the negative effects of cannabis use on job satisfaction were stronger for men than for women, and these results were consistent across measures of both uncontextualized cannabis use and measures specifying cannabis use at work. This study contributes to the literature on employee substance use by clarifying the directionality of cannabis use predicting subsequent job satisfaction, allowing organizations to understand how employee substance use may relate to job attitudes.