Lee, J., Forster, M., & Rehner, T. (2011). The retention of public child welfare workers: The roles of professional organizational culture and coping strategies. Children and Youth Services Review 33, 102-109.
This was a study of the effect of organizational culture on workers’ intentions to remain employed in child welfare, with worker coping strategies included as mediating variables. The sample comprised 234 front-line workers in Family and Children’s Services offices in a state in the southeastern US. The following measures were used:
- The Professional Organizational Culture (POC) scale (Ellett et al., 2003).
- Latack’s (1986) coping scale, used to measure worker responses to stressful situations at work. Two factors were used: control coping and avoidance coping.
- The Intent to Remain Employed in Child Welfare (IRE) scale (Ellett et al., 2003)
The most significant finding was the strong positive relationship between professional organizational culture and workers’ intentions to remain employed. This showed up in two ways: 1) Directly; and 2) Indirectly, through control coping as a mediating variable. Other variables in the model, avoidance coping, worker experience, and salary, were not found to be significantly related to intention to remain employed.
Both the original model and the eventual results of the analysis were illustrated in useful path diagrams. Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed model; though the sample was not large, fit indices reflected a good fit between the model and the sample data. Overall, the model explained 36% of the variance in workers’ intentions to remain employed.
The authors point out several limitations that could limit the generalizability of the findings. For example, data were limited to only one state, and the proportion of workers with social work degrees (77%) was higher than reported in comparable studies. Also, in a cross-sectional study like this, the causal sequence in the model is theoretical; alternatively, workers more committed to a career in child welfare might be more likely to engage in pro-active control coping. A longitudinal study could clarify this relationship, and also potentially make it possible to examine the relationship between organizational climate and actual recorded worker turnover.