Social Work Leadership: An Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Challenges

Exploring the Leadership Skills of Pre-Service Social Work Students: Implications for Social Work Education

“…The findings of the current study are consistent with the researchers' collective perception of the overall lack of leadership skills and preparedness of social workers to meet the challenges of the profession (e.g., Austin et al, 2011;Knee & Folsom, 2012;Peters, 2017). No relevant studies focused on the intersection of either interpersonal or problem-solving skills and leadership outcomes to compare and discuss with the results of this research have been found, but both the theoretical literature and empirical research confirm that these two types of skills underpinning social work practice are well incorporated into the social work curriculum (e.g., Gockel & Burton, 2014;Sheppard, & Charles, 2017;Trevithick, Richards, Ruch, & Moss, 2004).…”

“…Furthermore, some researchers (Jones & Phillips, 2016;Peters, 2017;Rank & Hutchinson, 2000) expressed a lot of concern over the lack of leadership skills that impacted the ability of social workers to effectively do their jobs, impeded the profession's ability to advocate for clients' rights and social justice issues, affected the integrity of the social work profession. Yet little empirical attention has been given to the leadership education of social workers.…”

How Unstandardized Work Tasks Create Arenas for Leadership

“…Drawing on a common definition of leadership as a process of influence (Yukl, 1989), I lean on Alvesson, Blom, and Sveningsson (2016) to define leadership as a specified voluntary, interpersonal process in which an actor influences the meaning-making and reality of a recipient. This understanding differs from previous efforts in human services research which have emphasized leaders at the organizational level as setting the "direction and tone of their organization[s]" (Hurst & Hurst, 2017, p. 440), reaching certain goals such as change or client service (see Peters, 2018;Sullivan, 2016), portraying values (see Peters, 2017Peters, , 2018Rank & Hutchison, 2000), or as being distributed within the organization (McKitterick, 2015).…”

“…This research identifies employees' and managers' perceptions and experiences of leadership characteristics and behaviors, and thus falls within the tradition of implicit leadership theory (Offermann & Coats, 2017). The study presents a conceptual framework of implicit leadership in public human services, an important contribution because of an identified lack of research concerning how leadership improves human service organizations (Castro, 2017;Peters, 2017;Sullivan, 2016). The study includes frontline managers and their employees.…”

Leading for better outcomes: social work as knowledge work

“…For social work, like in other professions experiencing tensions between administrative control and professional autonomy (Øverbye 2013;Aili, Nilsson, Svensson, and Denicolo 2007), striking a balance between adaptive and administrative functions is especially important. Such a balance includes the degree of control and freedom social workers are allowed in their role, as well as the identification of enabling practices that affect performance, while acknowledging that measuring 'performance' in such work is difficult because of conflicting demands and measurement challenges (Andersen, Boesen, and Pedersen 2016).…”