Background Women with depression disorder outnumber men, and health care and social service providers are mostly female. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study aims to examine the association between role conflicts and depression among health care and social service providers, and further investigate the mediating effect of burnout, as well as the moderating effect of marital status and motherhood. Methods The data come from the baseline of the ‘China Social Work Longitudinal Study’ conducted in 2019, which contains 1,219 female social workers who reported work-family conflict. The five items of the scale in our model were extracted from the existing literature to ensure the construct validity of potential variables, and confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were also conducted to ensure the validity and reliability of the scale. Descriptive analyses and correlation analyses were performed with SPSS 24, while the path analysis was conducted using Amos 24. The moderating effects of marital status and motherhood were further tested using multiple-group analyses. Results Female health care and social service providers experienced a high level of depression. Work-to-family conflict (WFC), family-to-work conflict (FWC), and organizational role conflict (ORC) were significantly and positively associated with female social workers’ depression. Exhaustion and cynicism fully mediated the effects of ORC on depression and partially mediated the effects of WFC on depression. In addition, FWC had only a direct effect on depression. A multiple-group analysis further indicated that both marital status and motherhood status may have played a moderating role in the conflict-burnout-depression link and that being unmarried and having no child were risk factors for depression in female health care and social service providers. Conclusions Marriage and motherhood have both negative and positive effects on the depression of female health care and social service providers. This suggests that marriage and motherhood may act as a form of “family clientelism” for female health care and social service providers who marry and have children.
The issue of role ambiguity is pervasive among service providers (Judd et al., 2017). Role ambiguity refers to a lack of clarity in one's understanding of work assignments and performance (Kahn et al., 1964). For service providers, delivering human services relies on human-to-human interaction and therefore involves complex role relationships (Rai, 2016). Meanwhile, purchase-of-service contracts, i.e., contracts between the contractor and the service provider for services, can create ambiguity among workers about job roles (Schmid, 2013). Specifically, service providers may have a vague sense of whether they are serving a professional mission or serving the interests of the contractor (Cho, 2017;Schmid, 2013).Disability support workers (DSWs), who provide physical and emotional support to people with disabilities, often suffer from role ambiguity (Vassos & Nankervis, 2012). Because DSWs need to provide meticulous day-to-day care for people with disabilities, and multitasking can easily lead to role ambiguity (Vassos & Nankervis, 2012). Meanwhile, the purchased service contracts can also cause role ambiguity for DSWs (Zhao & Grotz, 2019). Taking China as an example, its purchasing services practice has strong government embeddedness. Specifically, the government as a
In today’s era of new public management, respecting the dignity and worth of social workers in organizational management poses a challenge to social work agencies. This research explores whether individual self-actualization can be integrated with organizational development by using a humanistic management approach. Authors sampled 672 supervisors from Chinese social work agencies. A structural equation model was built and tested to examine the relationships between four latent variables: (1) professional competence (PC), (2) organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), (3) individual impact, and (4) organizational impact, taking into account the moderating effect of professional associations. The results indicate that individual impact is a mediator between supervisors’ PC/OCBs and organizational impact. Meanwhile, professional associations play a moderating role in the relationship between supervisors’ PC and organizational impact. Findings provide the basis for a humanistic management strategy for social work agencies that focuses on the individual impact of key people to maximize organizational impact. Moreover, professional associations should strengthen the link between individual impact and organizational impact.
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