Survival strategies in social work: a study of how coping strategies affect service quality, professionalism and employee health

Abstract

The restructuring of human service organisations into more lean organisations has brought increased work demands for many human service professions. Social work stands out as a particularly exposed occupational group, in which high work demands are paired with a large individual responsibility to carry out the job. The objectives of the study were to identify what kind of coping strategies social workers employ to handle the imbalance between demands and resources in work and to investigate how different strategies affect outcomes regarding health, service quality and professional development. Sixteen individual interviews and four group interviews with another 16 social workers were conducted. The analysis identified five different main types of strategies: Compensatory, Demand-reducing, Disengagement, Voice and Exit. An extensive use of compensatory strategies was connected with negative outcomes in health. Often, these compensatory strategies were replaced or combined with different means of reducing the work demands, which in turn influence performance and service quality in a negative way. The results highlight dilemmas the social workers are facing when the responsibility to deal with this imbalance is 'decentralised' to the individual social worker. When resources do not match the organisational goals or quality standards, the social workers are forced into strategies that either endanger their own health or threaten the quality of service.

Moral distress among social workers: The role of insufficient resources

“…These factors have emerged in many international and domestic studies on work-related well-being among social workers (e.g. Meeuwisse et al 2011;Blomberg et al 2014;Astvik et al 2014;Karpetis 2014). In Finland, a recent report revealed that nearly 90 per cent of Finnish child welfare workers considered that statuto-39 ry child welfare services had insufficient resources.…”

“…Naturally, social workers also work in order to enhance their own well-being, but they also work in order to enhance the well-being of their clients. These aims are not, however, easy to achieve or to combine (see Astvik et al 2014). Thus, it is not surprising that the work-related well-being of professional social workers or, more to the point, problems related to their well-being have become a popular topic of study during the last decades.…”

“…(Meeuwisse et al 2011. ) Thus lack of resources can also be manifested as problems in meeting professional standards and clients' needs (see Astvik et al 2014). In Finland, Anna Metteri and Kaisa-Elina Hotari (2011) studied ethical distress among professionals employed in psychiatric youth services.…”

“…Blomberg et al 2014;Lizano, Hsiao, Mor Barak & Casper 2014) and in the individual resources and coping strategies of the professionals themselves (e.g. Ben-Porat & Itzhaky 2014; Astvik et al 2014).…”

Distribution of responsibility in inter-professional teams in welfare-to-work

“…When talking about responsibility in social work, it is predominantly this moral or value-based responsibility that is in focus. Most of these studies concern the content of such moral responsibility (e.g., Payne 1999;Kleppe, Heggen, and Engebretsen 2015) or how professionals cope with competing organizational and moral responsibilities (e.g., Astvik, Melin, and Allvin 2013;McAuliffe and Sudbery 2005;Kjørstad 2005), with only a few addressing the distribution of responsibility (Solbrekke and Karseth 2006; Kleppe and Engebretsen 2010). Overall, these studies tend (implicitly) to place moral responsibility with the individual professional, overlooking the fact that social workers are not autonomous agents, able to act independently of the organizational context in which they are located (Payne 1999;Lonne, McDonald, and Fox 2004;Preston-Shoot 2011).…”