Peer Review
Working in Human Services: How Do Experiences and Working Conditions in Child Welfare Social Work Compare?
Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
Pia Tham is a doctoral candidate at Stockholm University, Department of Social Work, and is undertaking a research project on organizational conditions for child welfare social workers. Gabrielle Meagher is Professor of Social Policy in the Faculty of Education and Social Work
at the University of Sydney.
Correspondence to: Pia Tham, Department of Social work, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: pia.tham@socarb.su.se
Summary
Child welfare agencies in many rich countries are having difficulty recruiting and retain-
ing social workers. However, these problems are not unique to child welfare: retention
problems have also been widely reported in both mental and general health facilities. In
this paper, we compare the perceptions of work and working conditions held by child
welfare social workers with the perceptions held by other professional human service
workers in the public sector in Sweden. Do the social workers’ experiences of their tasks
or organizational conditions differ from the other groups, and, if so, how? Are workforce
problems particularly acute in child welfare, or do social workers in this field share more or
less common problems with other human service professionals? We found that although
social workers in general, and child welfare social workers in particular, made positive
assessments of some dimensions of their working lives, social work was unusually
demanding among human service professions on several measures of workload, complex-
ity of tasks and quality of management. The strains of the job that social workers
expressed call upon employers to promote working conditions that offer more support,
and to recognize and value social workers for their work.
Keywords: Child welfare social workers, human service occupations, comparison,
working conditions, human resource orientation
Introduction
Perhaps the most demanding role in social services is receiving and proces- sing referrals of children and youth in distress. Child welfare social workers
# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of
The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved
British Journal of Social Work (2009) 39, 807–827 doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcm170 Advance Access publication March 11, 2008
make difficult decisions that can profoundly influence the lives of the chil- dren and families concerned. They must also handle the often conflicting roles of supporting and counselling families on the one hand and exercising authority over them on the other. Unsurprisingly, then, there is consider- able evidence internationally that child welfare agencies are having diffi- culty recruiting and retaining staff (Audit Commission, 2002; Drake and Yadama, 1996; Employers Organisation, 2004; Gibelman and Schervish, 1996; Mor Barak et al., 2001, 2006).
However, these problems are not unique to social work in child welfare: for example, difficulties in retaining psychiatric nurses and other pro- fessional workers in mental health facilities have been reported for the UK (Huxley et al., 2005), Australia (Holmes, 2006), the USA (Jinnett and Alexander, 1999) and Japan (Ito et al., 2001), and shortages of general nurses around the world’s rich democracies are also widely reported. Thus, workforce problems in child welfare may simply be one part of a more general predicament in human service organizations, which require a stable, well trained workforce to deliver effective services, but which also seem to have persistent problems in acquiring and maintain- ing one.
This study compared the perceptions of work and working conditions held by child welfare social workers with the perceptions held by other professional human service workers in the public sector in Sweden. Do the social workers’ experiences of their tasks or organizational conditions differ significantly from other groups’, and, if so, how? Are workforce pro- blems particularly acute in child welfare, or do social workers in this field share common problems with human service professionals more broadly? The comparison was expected to be revealing in two ways. First, it would shed light on what aspects of child welfare social workers’ working conditions needed to be improved for increased job satisfaction and lower turnover. Second, given that problems of recruitment and reten- tion of professional human service workers are widespread in social service and health care systems around the world, what our findings revealed about human service professionals in other fields might also be of broader use.
Background: social workers in Sweden
There is little doubt that social work is a demanding job in Sweden. Several recent national reports have found that among female employees, social workers are the occupational group most often exposed to work strain. A compilation of research for 1999–2003 found that among social workers, 88 per cent said their work was psychologically demanding (National Work Environment Authority and Statistics Sweden, 2003). In another compilation of studies from 2002–05, female social workers were most
808 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
likely to report stress-related disorders (34 per cent), sleep disorders (28 per cent) and to belong to the occupational categories with the largest pro- portion on long-term sick leave (10 per cent) (National Work Environment Authority and Statistics Sweden, 2005).
Despite these evident workforce problems, increasing demands that social service work be evidence-based means that research and policy debate tend to target social work methods and activities rather than how social workers feel about their work and the organizations within which they work. One exception is Dellgran and Höjer (2005), whose study of social worker career paths included some investigation of working con- ditions. They found that public social service work was becoming a low- status entrance and early exit area of work and that, among public social workers, those in child welfare had the least job experience and were least satisfied with their working conditions.
Overall, few Swedish studies have examined the working conditions of social workers more recently, and most are qualitative, county-level studies (Olsson, 2003; Wilson, 2004). Bearing in mind the limitations on generalizing from such studies, they show a vulnerable occupational group suffering from relatively high recruitment and retention problems. One quantitative county-level study of child welfare social workers has found that although more than half of the 309 participants (54 per cent) had been working for two years or less at their current workplace, almost half (48 per cent) intended to leave their jobs in the near future (Tham, 2007). A recent national investigation also showed that many social workers in child welfare had limited occupational experience (National Board of Health and Welfare, 2007).
In sum, then, Swedish social workers work under increasingly tough con- ditions, doing a responsible and demanding job, often in work groups in which many are newly recruited, while many others are on their way to finding new jobs. Thus, it seemed important to acquire better knowledge of their perceptions of their work. What makes it so demanding? And are there positive aspects that might motivate these social workers to remain at their workplaces?
Method
This study compared survey data collected among social workers in child welfare (N ¼ 309) with a sample (n ¼ 4,271) taken from a more extensive survey (N ¼ 22,532) by researchers at the Karolinska Institute of municipal and county council personnel in Sweden (the KI/AFA study). Use of a common instrument—the Nordic Questionnaire for Psychological and Social Factors at Work or ‘QPS Nordic’ (Dallner et al., 2000)—made our comparison possible.
Working in Human Services 809
Data collection and sample
Social workers in child welfare
A survey was conducted in the winter and spring of 2002–03 among child welfare social workers in Stockholm county (N ¼ 309). All the social workers in the field of child welfare who were handling referrals and inves- tigating the situation of children and youth in these areas were included. The study comprised a total of 42 workgroups in twelve municipalities and nine town districts. The principle guiding the selection of municipalities and town districts was to obtain as wide as possible socio-economic vari- ation between areas. The sampling method was systematic: municipalities and town districts were ranked by the proportion of children and youth in out-of-home care (proportion/1,000 children and youth/inhabitants) and every second municipality/town district was chosen from the ranked list, to ensure that areas with high, medium as well as low proportions of children in out-of-home care were included. Lundström and Vinnerljung (2001) have shown that this measure co-varies with other indicators of social disadvantage, such as high social assistance costs per inhabitant, a high proportion of single mothers and a high proportion of non-Nordic immigrants. The drop-out rate was 3 per cent overall (eleven of 320 ques- tionnaires were not returned). (For further information about the data col- lection, see Tham (2007).)
The comparison groups
The comparison groups consisted of professional (i.e. university-educated) personnel in four public human service organizations selected from the KI/ AFA survey data (see Table 1). The response rate was high, at over 90 per cent. At the time of writing, comprehensive classifications by occupation of the KI/AFA data were not available. However, it was possible to extract broad occupational groups from several different public human service organizations for comparison with the child welfare social workers. To ensure maximum comparability, only professional workers were selected, resulting in the following distribution: municipal social welfare offices (n ¼ 276), hospitals (n ¼ 3,176), pre-schools (n ¼ 377) and compulsory schools (n ¼ 502). Personnel employed in compulsory schools were mostly teachers, although those working with pupil welfare were probably included, along with principals and higher-level administrators. From pre- schools, the absolute majority were pre-school teachers. Those employed in hospitals probably comprised a wider spectrum of occupational groups, including nurses, physicians, physiotherapists and almoners. (Unfortu- nately, the data were coded so that we could not separate physicians, who form a relatively high-status and well paid occupational group, from other professional occupations, such as nurses and almoners, who were
810 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
more directly comparable to child welfare social workers. Thus, the com- parison with hospital staff is not quite as robust as our other comparisons with professional staff employed in social welfare offices and schools.) Among those employed at social welfare offices, almost all would have been social workers. An important difference between the 309 child welfare social workers in focus in this study and the social worker compari- son group was that the comparison group comprised social workers who worked in various fields of social work. Another difference was that the four comparison groups were drawn from many parts of Sweden, whereas the child welfare social workers all worked in Stockholm county.
The instrument: QPS Nordic
The QPS Nordic questionnaire used was developed to increase the scienti- fic quality and comparability of data on the psychological, social and organ- izational work environment (Dallner et al., 2000). It builds on three basic concepts: workload, complexity of tasks and quality of management. The reliability and validity of questionnaire and scales have been tested twice. For a more detailed description of the theoretical underpinnings of the QPS Nordic, the preparation of the questionnaire and the validation process, see Dallner et al. (2000). The scales and their items are presented in Table 2.
Table 1 Descriptive statistics of the social workers in child welfare and professional workers from other Swedish human service organizations
Social workers in child welfare (n ¼ 309)
Social welfare offices (n ¼ 276)
Hospitals (n ¼ 3,186)
Pre-schools (n ¼ 377)
Compulsory schools (n ¼ 502)
Time at work- place (years)a
4 – 15 11 13
Percentage women
85 86 83 96 80
Average ageb 40 45 44 42 46 Percentage
20–30 years 17 12 13 21 16
31–40 40 23 25 22 20 41–50 25 31 32 35 17 51–60 17 30 26 20 37 60 þ 1 4 3 2 10
a This question was excluded from some of the AFA questionnaires so the values should be inter- preted with care. The question was not put to the social welfare office personnel and was missing in 30 per cent of the questionnaires to the personnel in hospitals, 34 per cent of the questionnaires to the pre-school personnel and in 10 per cent of the questionnaires to the compulsory school personnel. b Based on the age groups presented in the remainder of the table.
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Table 2 Measures of work experience and working conditions
Scales Items
Quantitative demands Have too much to do Have to work overtime Workload tends to pile up
Learning demands Tasks too difficult Have tasks that demand more education Have tasks that demand new knowledge and skills
Role clarity Responsibilities are known What is expected at work is exactly known
Role conflict Obliged to do things in a way that should be done differently Given assignments without adequate resources to complete
them Confronted with incompatible requests from two or more
people Control over decision making Possibility to influence work methods
Possibility to influence the amount of work given Possibility to influence choice of co-workers
Feeling of mastery on the job Satisfaction with quality of work Satisfaction with the amount of work done Satisfaction with ability to create good relationships with
co-workers Support and feedback from closest
superior Support and help from immediate superior if needed
Immediate superior willing to listen to work related problems if needed
Work achievements appreciated by immediate superior Support from co-workers Support and help from co-workers if needed
Co-workers willing to listen to job-related problems Fair leadership Immediate superior distributes work fairly and impartially
Immediate superior treats staff fairly and equally Relationship to immediate superior a source of stress
Encouraging leadership Encouragement from immediate superior to participate in decision making
Encouragement from immediate superior to express own opinions
Support from immediate superior to develop skills Social climate The extent to which the climate in the work unit can be
described as: – encouraging and supportive – distrustful and suspicious – relaxed and comfortable
Innovative climate Staff allowed to take own initiatives Staff encouraged to make workplace improvements Sufficiency of communication
Inequality Experience of unequal treatment on account of gender at the workplace
Experience of unequal treatment on account of age at the workplace
Human resource orientation Rewarded for work well done Staff well taken care of by the organization Management interested in the health and well-being of staff
Interaction between work and private life
Negative influence of job demands on private life
812 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
Statistical methods
The data were analysed in SPSS 13.0. Linear regression analysis, with child welfare workers as the reference category and the comparison groups as dummy variables, was used to examine differences between the child welfare social workers and the others, controlling for differences in age. Most of the variables included in the analysis were symmetrical and seemed to be approximately normally distributed. In a few other cases, they were transformed to give a more symmetric distribution. No correction for Type 1 errors was made.
Results
Table 1 shows that child welfare social workers had, on average, been employed at their current workplaces for considerably shorter periods than any of the comparison groups and had the lowest average age. As many as 57 per cent were under the age of forty compared with 35–43 per cent in the comparison groups.
Table 3 presents perceptions of working conditions in all the groups (mean values on scales set out in Table 2). Table 3 shows that, compared with other professional workers in public human service organizations, child welfare social workers experienced significantly higher quantitative and learning demands (p , 0.001), lower role clarity (at least p , 0.05), relatively high role conflict and lower self-valuation of mastery in work (p , 0.001) compared with teachers, social workers in social welfare offices and hospital personnel.
These findings suggest that social work in child welfare is an unusually demanding area of human service practice. Yet, child welfare social workers were significantly more likely to describe their immediate superior in a more positive way than any of the other groups, to describe the possi- bility of getting support and feedback as high (at least p , 0.01) and to report that their immediate superior’s leadership was encouraging and fair. They also experienced significantly greater control over decisions than any other study group (p , 0.001).
On the subject of organizational climate, which included scales measur- ing social climate, innovative climate, inequality and human resource orien- tation, the picture becomes more complex. Like all the human service professions surveyed, child welfare social workers described a highly encouraging, supportive, relaxed and comfortable social climate at work, but they were the least likely to find their workplace innovative and most likely to find it unequal. Among the single questions of the scale measuring human resource orientation, the picture was also mixed (values of the single items of the scales are not presented in the table). Social workers in child
Working in Human Services 813
welfare were more satisfied than other professional human service workers with the extent to which they were valued for a job well done (the mean score of the group was 2.22 compared with 1.40–1.46 for three of the other groups and 1.66 for the fourth). Social workers in child welfare
Table 3 The incidence of significant differences between child welfare workers and comparison groups.a Mean values and levels of significance after control for age
Social workers in child welfare units (n ¼ 309)
Professional employees (KI/AFA data-set)
Social welfare offices (n ¼ 276)
Hospitals (n ¼ 3,186)
Pre-schools (n ¼ 377)
Nine-year com- pulsory schools (n ¼ 502)
Quantitative demandsb
3.43 3.15*** 2.98*** 2.60*** 3.04***
Learning demands 3.17 2.65*** 2.62*** 2.28*** 2.67*** Control of
decisions 3.53 3.05*** 2.84*** 2.95*** 3.03***
Role clarity 3.90 4.09* 4.32*** 4.43*** 4.24*** Role conflicts 2.82 2.89 2.48*** 2.53*** 2.82 Feeling of
masteryc 3.60 3.97*** 4.01*** 4.03*** –
Support and feed- back from immediate superior
3.75 3.51** 3.52*** 3.49*** 3.47***
Support from co-workers
4.18 4.19 4.15 4.33** 4.17
Encouraging leadership
3.26 3.13 3.11* 3.12 3.05*
Fair leadership 4.09 3.77*** 3.96* 3.89** 4.04 Social climate 3.90 3.69** 3.80 3.86 3.93 Innovative climate 3.39 3.47 3.56*** 3.79*** 3.67*** Inequality 2.00 1.56*** 1.54*** 1.25*** 1.44*** Human resource
orientation 2.62 2.41** 2.66 2.65 2.76**
Interaction between work and private life
2.96 2.85 2.52*** 2.50*** 2.80
*p , 0.05; **p , 0.01; ***p , 0.001. a The differences have been tested by linear regression in which the child welfare workers form the reference group and the comparison groups are treated as dummy variables. b The response alternatives are graded 1–5, e.g. for all questions except social climate, human resource orientation and inequality (see below): 1 ¼ very seldom or never, 2 ¼ rather seldom, 3 ¼ sometimes, 4 ¼ rather often, 5 ¼ very often or always. For the questions measuring social climate, human resource orientation and inequality the response alternatives are: 1 ¼ very little or not at all, 2 ¼ rather little, 3 ¼ somewhat, 4 ¼ rather much, 5 ¼ very much. A higher value indicates more of what is measured. In some cases, a higher value is positive and indicates good working conditions (as, for example, for support and feedback from superior) and, in other cases, it is negative and indicates poor working conditions (as for quantitative demands), depending on what is being referred to in the question. c This scale was not included in the questionnaire to compulsory school workers.
814 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
were also more likely to describe their work as negatively influencing their private life than any other study group.
Overall, the two groups of social workers had the most negative responses on the majority of scales measured. These findings support the conclusion that social workers in general are more exposed to problems at work than human service professionals in schools and hospitals. This was especially true for quantitative demands, role clarity, role conflict, interaction between work and private life, and for all the aspects of organ- izational climate measured. Focusing again on the single items measuring human resource orientation, the mean scores of both groups of social workers on how well staff were taken care of were lower (2.90 and 2.91, respectively) compared with the other groups’ mean scores of 3.32–3.43. On the item measuring the extent to which the management was interested in personnel health and well-being, the mean scores of the social workers were lowest (2.87 for both groups) while the other groups’ mean scores lay between 3.13 and 3.29.
Discussion
Our aim in this part of the study was to compare social workers in child welfare in the county of Stockholm with other professionals working in public human service organizations around Sweden, in terms of their experience at work and of different aspects of the organizations they worked for. Even though all the groups included in this study consisted of highly educated professional workers in public human service organiz- ations, of whom at least 80 per cent were women, there were some clear dividing lines between the social workers in child welfare and the compari- son groups. The former were younger, had been employed for considerably shorter periods at their current workplaces and all worked in the county of Stockholm, while the other groups come from around the country as a whole. However, our findings showed that statistically significant differ- ences remained even after controlling for age, so that observed differences in perceptions and experience could not be explained by the age differences between the child welfare social workers and the comparison groups. More- over, although the child welfare social workers were drawn only from the county of Stockholm, most of them worked in different suburbs and the county included some more rural areas as well as areas characterized by dif- ficult socio-economic conditions along with wealthy municipalities and inner-city districts. This means that differences between the two samples were unlikely to explain all of the differences in the experiences of child welfare social workers and the other groups.
Our findings on job demands accord with and extend those of existing research. Several previous studies have found that social workers experi- ence high workloads (Gibson et al., 1989; Jones et al., 1991; Marsh and
Working in Human Services 815
Triseliotis, 1996; Balloch et al., 1998; McLean, 1999; Huxley et al., 2005). More recent Swedish interview-based research also confirms this picture of high workloads and emotional strain (Olsson, 2003; Wilson, 2004). Several British studies have also found that social workers in child welfare report higher levels of psychological stress and higher levels of anxiety than other groups in social services (Bennet et al., 1993; Balloch et al., 1998; McLean, 1999).
Although social workers in child welfare described high job demands on both quantity and learning measures, they also described greater control over decision making than any of the comparison groups. This result accords with Lipsky’s (1980) concept of the street-level bureaucrat: Swedish social workers have substantial autonomy in deciding how to carry out their work tasks. According to the demand–control model of Karasek and Theorell (1990), workers in occupations with a high degree of control in addition to high job demands are less exposed to strain, while low control appears to have more negative effects on health and well-being.
However, the relationship between control, job demands and strain may be more complex. First, the concept of control has come under increasing criticism, both for lack of clarity and for the general positive meaning it is given. In some professions, a high degree of control has been associated with ill-health, in direct contrast with the relationship postulated by the model (Vahtera et al., 1996; de Rijk et al., 1998). Others have found that when time pressure and emotional demands are both high—as for social workers—job control does not seem to have any buffering effect (van Vegchel et al., 2004; Teuchmann et al., 1999). The nature of demands can also make a difference. Some researchers stress the importance of emotional demands (de Jonge et al., 1999; Pelfrene et al., 2001; Söderfeldt et al., 1997) for the health of the workers; others have found quantitative demands, such as workload, to be more influential for burnout (Schaufeli and Buunk, 2003) and the most commonly cited cause of depression (Stanley et al., 2007). Emotional strain might explain why social workers in both groups we studied were most likely to respond nega- tively to questions about the interaction between work and private life: pre- vious research has found that social workers can have difficulty keeping a sound (and necessary) emotional distance from clients (Bennet et al., 1993; Le Croy and Rank, 1987).
Our findings showed that social workers were more likely to experience role conflict and less likely to experience role clarity than the comparison groups (with the exception of compulsory school personnel). Lower role clarity is a common problem in human service organizations, in which goals are often described as vague and ambiguous (Hasenfeld, 1992). Both role clarity and role conflict are central concepts in studies of working conditions in human service organizations, both for the experience of stress and for job satisfaction (Harrison, 1980; Glisson and Durick, 1988;
816 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
Heinish and Jex, 1997; Balloch et al., 1998; Um and Harrison, 1998; Carpenter et al., 2003).
It is not surprising that social workers are particularly vulnerable to lack of role clarity and to role conflict (Harrison, 1980; Carpenter et al., 2003). Because people are the ‘raw material’ of social services work, the work makes some unique demands. Clear definitions of problems and predeter- mined lines of action (such as in work manuals) are typically lacking and cases are seldom, if ever, exactly the same. Individualized assessments of needs are expected, which means that earlier assessments and actions taken can rarely be applied to subsequent cases. There are often conflicting interests within the same case, too, such as between the needs of children and their parents. Further, because municipal government has a role in decision making about child welfare cases in Sweden, local policies about, for example, the placement of children and youth in out-of-home care may conflict directly with the social worker’s assessment of a child’s needs.
Our findings also showed a significantly lower mean score among child welfare social workers for the feeling of mastery in their work. Because social workers in the KI/AFA data-set described their mastery as consider- ably higher, and similar to the remaining comparison groups, one wonders whether this low self-evaluation reflects the specific difficulties of work with child protection, or whether the greater demands of child welfare work in a metropolitan region explain this divergence. The higher quantitative demands of child welfare work, combined with the greater difficulty of tasks that child welfare social workers described, could reduce their sense of mastery. It may also be that these social workers have internalized hard- ening community attitudes towards the social services. Research in the new institutional sociology (Meyer and Rowan, 1991; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991) stresses the importance of the environment for legitimizing the exist- ence of an organization.
In the UK in recent years, public opinion has been very critical towards social workers and especially towards those working in child protection (Jones, 2001; Audit Commission, 2002; Harlow, 2004). This precipitated a decline in the status of the profession, expressed, among other things, in steeply declining applications for social work training (Moriarty and Murray, 2007). In turn, these developments have prompted profound changes in the funding and organization of social work education in recent years. Certainly, several British studies describe the negative attitude of the public to social worker competence as a source of stress (Gibson et al., 1989; Jones et al., 1991; Collings and Murray, 1996). Child protective work has been particularly targeted by the press (Franklin and Parton, 1991; Franklin, 1998; Reid and Misener, 2001), leading to a work climate charac- terized by fear (Ayre, 2001).
Negative publicity against child welfare social work also occurs in Sweden, particularly around taking children into custody, although it has yet to become as negative as in the UK. Nevertheless, the debate
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concerning a need for more evidence-based work in the social services (National Board of Health and Welfare, 2001, 2004) does imply criticism of their work and methods, and research is yet to establish how social workers feel about this and what the long-run consequences may be for their feeling of pride and mastery in their work. In response to similar press- ures, in English-speaking countries, social work has become increasingly routinized and formalized, with less space for social workers to make their own decisions (Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996; Gibelman and Schervish, 1996; Parton, 1998; Parton and O’Byrne, 2000; Jones, 2001), leading to deprofessionalization (Healy and Meagher, 2004).
That social workers described the possibility of getting support from their immediate superior as positively as in the present study has not, to our knowledge, emerged previously. Indeed, earlier research has found that social workers most often describe a lack of support at work (Karolinska Institute, 2001). Other studies have also described the insufficient support social workers receive from colleagues and superiors (Samantrai, 1992; Bradley and Sutherland, 1995; Oxenstierna, 1997; Uggerhöj, 1996). Mean- while, human service workers have more often reported lack of feedback from their superiors and from the organization (Pousette et al., 2001; Karolinska Institute, 2001). Social workers in the KI/AFA data-set reported lower support from their superiors than did child welfare social workers (and similar levels to other comparison groups). Perhaps, then, the more supportive leadership style the child welfare workers described was due to greater awareness among their superiors of the difficulties and demands of the job.
In fact, there is some debate about the importance of support. Many have found evidence for the hypothesis of a buffering effect of support (La Rocco et al., 1980; Kirmeyer and Dougherty, 1988; Johnson et al., 1989; Johnson and Hall, 1994; Frese, 1999; Viswesvaran et al., 1999; Mor Barak et al., 2001), but this has not been replicated in several other studies (Jayaratne and Chess, 1984; Ganster et al., 1986; Beehr and McGrath, 1992; Burke and Greenglass, 1995; Mor Barak et al., 2006). However, in a meta-analysis (Lee and Ashforth, 1996), lack of social support from superiors was related to burnout and, most clearly, to emotional exhaustion. One difficulty in interpreting the role of support is that high levels of support can be a result of a demanding situation, which leads to the acti- vation of these resources in a work group, as co-workers and superiors learn to support each other. It may not be possible, then, to determine the direction of causation when high levels of support occur alongside high job demands or high stress in a cross-sectional study, as found in the data here on social workers in child welfare. Nevertheless, given the very high job demands described by social workers in child welfare, their positive assess- ment of support from their superiors takes on even greater importance.
Child welfare social workers’ positive perception of their superiors as offering encouraging and fair leadership also stands out. This finding was
818 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
not replicated among the social workers in the KI/AFA group, whose mean scores were similar to, or lower than, the other comparison groups’. Regard- ing fair leadership, the greatest difference was between the child welfare workers and the social workers in the comparison group. It may be that the child welfare workers’ superiors give priority to establishing good relationships with their staff—something that seems even more important with the recruitment difficulties and high turnover that have emerged in the earlier studies and in annual supervisory reports we cited above.
Social workers were also more likely than the other groups studied to report negative perceptions of organizational climate overall, though not in respect of social climate. This concordance between the responses of the two groups gives the results more weight and opens up the question of how we might interpret them. It may be that the lack of human resource orientation within their organizations that social workers described arises because management is so focused upon meeting client needs that it tends to ignore staff needs to be seen and to feel well taken care of. This hypothesis is supported by our findings that social worker groups are more negative than the other groups on measures of how well taken care of they feel and of their experience of management interest in their health and well-being (two of the three questions included in the scale human resource orientation). Another possible explanation is that the psychological demands of social work increase the need for this kind of rec- ognition and reward at work. Whatever the explanation, this result seems worthy of some reflection. For child welfare social workers, for example, investigating the situations of children and youth seldom involves positive feedback from clients. Investigations are rarely welcomed by client families and encounters between social workers and clients are more likely to involve feelings of insecurity, fear and avoidance.
Our finding that social workers were more likely to report lack of atten- tion to staff welfare in their workplaces confirms some earlier studies of social workers (Gibbs, 2001; Jones, 2001; Huxley et al., 2005). Studies of human service organizations emphasize the importance of organizational climate for job satisfaction among workers (Bradley and Sutherland, 1995; Silver et al., 1997) and for social workers’ perception of role conflict and client satisfaction (Jimmieson and Griffin, 1998). Organizational climate can also be important for clients: a positive climate in child welfare work groups has been associated with psychosocial well-being among the children they have placed in out-of-home care (Glisson and Hemmelgarn, 1998).
As reported in the previous section, child welfare social workers were least likely of all human service professional groups to perceive their organ- izations as innovative, and the social workers in the KI/AFA data-set group received the next lowest mean score on this scale. One possible explanation is that the exercise of legal authority inherent in the work of the social ser- vices and the constraints of administrative routines, rules and guidelines
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hamper innovation in how work tasks are carried out. However, we have also found that child welfare social workers are significantly more likely to report that they have control over their decisions at work. Perhaps poor communication hampers innovation; certainly, both groups of social workers described communication in the workplace as more insufficient than other groups did. Further, Länsisalmi and Kivimäki (1999) found an association between stress and deficient innovative climate, which accords with our finding that the social workers were most likely to describe themselves as having too much to do and to feel obliged to work overtime. McLean (1999) also found that only a third of the social workers were sat- isfied with their opportunity to exert an influence when they felt that a change was necessary, or with the extent of management’s attention to their suggestions.
Conclusion
Although these Swedish social workers in general, and child welfare workers in particular, made very positive assessments of some dimensions of their working lives, our findings support the conclusion that social work is unusually demanding among human service professions. The strains and difficulties of the job expressed by the social workers in this study call upon employers to be more aware of social workers’ exposed pos- ition, to offer more support and relief from some of the pressure, and to give social workers greater recognition and a sense of being valued for their work.
The fact that the social workers themselves were more likely than other human service professionals to assess the quality of their work as low makes the need for external valuation even greater. The importance of supervision for reducing role ambiguity (Harrison, 1980), for increasing job satisfaction (Harrison, 1980; Samantrai, 1992; Rycraft, 1994) and for influencing the decision to remain at the workplace (Rycraft, 1994; Gibbs, 2001) is often stressed in studies of social workers, while a lack of support (Goldberg Levin, 2003) or an unsatisfactory relationship to the immediate superior (Samantrai, 1992) is described as instrumental for social workers’ decisions to leave the workplace. Collings and Murray (1996) emphasize the supervi- sor’s importance for reducing stress, especially where there is an encoura- ging leadership style that reinforces the social workers’ feeling of being valued in their organizations. However, the immediate superiors of the child welfare social workers in focus in this study seemed to have recog- nized the need for support, feedback and encouragement and appeared as exemplary models.
Mostly happy with their immediate supervision, what social workers in this study expressed dissatisfaction with was how recognition and support are handled by the managements of their organizations. What, then, do
820 Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher
these social workers need and/or feel is lacking? Do they require a differ- ent, more intense and direct kind of support? By support, we mean more than just the opportunity to discuss difficult tasks or problems in client work, but also having a ‘mentor’ who can serve as a good model for how to act and handle demanding situations at work. Healy and colleagues (forthcoming) set out in detail a model for this kind of support.
Further, the child welfare social workers were younger and have worked for a significantly shorter time at their current work places than the com- parison groups in the study (Table 1): almost a third of them (28 per cent) had been working in the occupation for two years or less (Tham, 2007). A recent study among those new in the profession has found that 41 per cent described themselves as not fully capable to make decisions in work, 27 per cent reported that they rather often or very often/always had to perform tasks which required more experience and only about half of them (57 per cent) described themselves as rather often or very often/always having enough knowledge to performing work tasks in a pro- fessional way (Tham, 2007). Given the picture emerging from the current study of stressful and demanding work in social work in general, and in child welfare in particular, it is not hard to understand that those who have less experience—or are even totally inexperienced—report lack of competence and feelings of insufficiency.
In an earlier study of these child welfare social workers, dissatisfaction with the human resource orientation within the organization was the most important factor in their decision to leave the workplace (Tham, 2007). Indeed even though, as has we have shown here, child welfare social workers experience higher workloads and more difficult work tasks than other Swedish human service workers, these factors were not import- ant influences on their intention to leave. Instead, what mattered was the feeling of not being valued enough, of not feeling well taken care of, or that management did not show enough interest in the health and well-being of the staff. This does not mean that high workloads, time pressure and dif- ficulty of tasks can continue to go unrecognized and neglected: high levels of stress negatively influence workplace climate and the quality of the work done, and, in the long run, undermine workers’ health and well-being.
Ultimately, the dissatisfaction that social workers express about how different tasks are handled in their organizations can be seen, paradoxically, both as an expression and a consequence of their professional skills. Social workers are specially trained to observe social processes and social inter- play, and to pay attention to emotional needs, which, reasonably enough, demand a more critical eye and, logically enough, raise their awareness of how their own organizations function in these respects. Other studies have found that social workers are more dissatisfied than other groups with conditions and processes within their organizations and with how their own work groups function (Bradley and Sutherland, 1995; Carpenter et al., 2003).
Working in Human Services 821
In light of the recruitment difficulties and high turnover in child welfare in recent years, our findings indicate the need for a greater (and improved) human resource orientation within the social services. This study demon- strates that social work, and especially child welfare social work, is an especially demanding occupation. These, as well as earlier findings (Tham, 2007), indicate the need for reform in the management of social ser- vices to ensure that staff are better cared for and that special training and/ or mentorship are offered to social workers entering child welfare. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (2006) has recently pro- posed that occupational experience of at least one year should be required before entering child welfare social work. The question is: will this be enough? Lastly, it is important to remember that when staff are recognized and respected in working conditions that make it possible for them to carry out their extremely responsible work tasks in a professional way, clients are the ultimate beneficiaries.
Accepted: December 2007
Acknowledgements
The Swedish Council financed the research for Working Life and Social Research. The authors are grateful to the social services departments which gave their agreement for staff to be approached and to the individual social workers themselves who responded to the questionnaire. The authors would like to thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions in respect of this paper.
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