Why do Social Workers Leave? A Moderated Mediation of Professionalism, Job Satisfaction, and Managerialism

Abstract

Turnover has been a serious concern to social service organizations. A lack of committed social workers is a risk to organizational performance and service quality. Therefore, it is vital to better understand the leaving process of social work practitioners. The study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine the mediating role of job satisfaction between employees’ professionalism and turnover intention and the moderating role of the perceived level of managerialism in the context of social work organizations. A total of 667 participants from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China were recruited to complete the survey. Results presented that job satisfaction plays a full mediation role in the relationship between professionalism and turnover intention. In addition, the positive relationship between professionalism and job satisfaction, as well as the negative relationship between professionalism and turnover intention were moderated by managerialism. The findings enrich knowledge about turnover among social workers in the context of China and inspire to foster professionalism among service workers to improve job satisfaction and alleviate turnover intention and actual turnover as well as to apply management techniques and structures properly to strengthen the effect of professionalism on promoting job satisfaction and on preventing turnover intention.

Psychological Capital and Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Burnout among Healthcare Professionals

“…Positive responses to workplace stimuli engender constructive attitudes, such as work engagement, empowerment, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, which substantively contribute to personal and occupational well-being. [59,87,88]. This may elucidate the research community's deep-seated interest in investigating fac-tors that enhance individual psychological resources and mitigate burnout and turnover intentions [88,89].…”

“…In other words, an individual's intention to leave a job is related to their perception of their prospects of finding another one. Additionally, turnover intention has been examined in relation to various constructs, including job satisfaction [7,25,[58][59][60], mental health and well-being, leadership [29], organizational commitment [25], social support [61], professional identity [62], organizational climate [3], organizational citizenship behavior [63], and others. Furthermore, there is a substantial body of research investigating the relationship between turnover intention and burnout [22,24,39,[64][65][66][67][68][69][70], as well as its connection with the construct of psychological capital [25,58,[71][72][73][74].…”

Why Do Employees Show Pro-Environmental Behaviors? A Perspective of Environment Social Responsibility

“…Based on social identity theory, employees who identify their firms’ values, will modify their work values toward the firms’ values, which will form a green commitment. However, if employees cannot modify their work value to meet their firms’ values, they will leave their firms [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ], which will not form a green commitment.…”