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The economic impact of drug and alcohol abuse on health care, law enforcement and worker productivity is substantial. In an effort to address alcohol and substance abuse in the workforce, some organizations have introduced drug testing programs for job applicants and existing employees. Over the past five years there has been a significant increase in the work sites with drug testing programs. Despite this, little attention has been given to study the effects of drug testing on employee attitudes and behaviour.
The model tested in this research predicted that employee, organizational and program characteristics influence an employee's perception of need for drug testing programs. To test the hypothesis a cross-sectional survey was conducted of four hundred and eighteen individuals across Ontario. Potential respondents were given a self-administered questionnaire to complete. Data were analyzed using t-test, correlation and frequency statistics.
Results indicate that some organizational characteristics, namely, size of the organization, presence of union in existence within the workplace and work interdependencies do in fact influence an employees perception of need for drug testing programs. In addition, employee characteristics, namely, drug and alcohol consumption, age, education, marital status, gender and happiness also influence employees perception of need for drug testing programs.
Organizations considering implementing a drug testing program may find these results useful in predicting whether their particular workplace would be supportive of a drug testing program.