Organizational Justice and Social Workers' Intentions to Leave Agency Positions

Abstract

The authors investigated the impact of organizational justice on social workers' intention to leave Korean social service agencies. Specifically, this study concentrated on the moderating effect of organizational justice on the relationship between burnout and intention to leave. The authors surveyed 218 front-line social workers from 51 social welfare service centers in Korea. Data were collected from a sample of social workers indentified through a multistage cluster sampling process. The authors used a linear mixed model to analyze the multilevel data structure. This study had three major findings. First, higher levels of burnout of individual social workers corresponded to increased intention to leave. Second, higher levels of organizational justice of social welfare service centers corresponded to decreased intention to leave. Finally, and most important, the organizational justice of social welfare service centers moderated the impact of burnout on individual social workers' intention to leave. On the basis of these results, the authors discuss the importance of organizational justice to social service agencies. KEY WORDS: burnout; intention to leave; moderating effect; organizational justice ********** Within a human service agency, the primary workforce is social workers (Sung, 1993). Frequent turnover among social workers causes practical problems for social work agencies in terms of service discontinuance and loss of skilled practitioners (Carmeli & Weisberg, 2006; Loewenberg, 1979). Given the high costs of social worker turnover, finding effective strategies to reduce turnover rates has been a great concern and challenge in social work settings (Abu-Bader, 2000; Curry, McCarragher, & Dellmann-Jenkins, 2005; Vandervort, Pott Gozalez, & Coulborn Failer, 2008). Previous literature has consistently demonstrated that intention to leave is one of the strongest predictors and an immediate precursor of social worker turnover (Harrington, Bean, Pintello, & Mathew, 2001; Vandervort et al., 2008). A number of social work administrators and professionals have attempted to determine the factors that affect social workers' intention to leave social service agencies (Chiu & Lai, 1997; Ulrish et al., 2007). Several studies have revealed associations between the psychological and demographic characteristics of individual social workers and their intention to leave (Drake & Yamada, 1996; Harrington et al., 2001). Generally, the results of these studies have determined that burnout of social workers significantly increased their intention to leave (Drake & Yamada, 1996; Harrington et al., 2001). These studies, however, have focused primarily on individual factors of social workers as the predictors of intention to leave, ignoring the influence of the social-environmental context of social work agencies. Currently, organizational theory emphasizes the leverage effect of organizational factors on intention to leave among organizational members (Acker, 2004; DePanfilis & Zlotnik, 2008). As George and Jones (1996) pointed out, the impact of individual factors on turnover may be moderated by other organizational factors, such as a supportive organizational climate. Current organizational research has shown increasing interest in organizational justice as a potential factor that creates benefits for both organizations and their individual members (Judge & Colquitt, 2004; Lain, Schaubroeck, & Aryee, 2002). Other fields--including education, public administration, and business--have investigated the dynamic between organizational justice and the intention to leave or turnover rates among organizational members. Prior studies conducted in these fields have indicated that enhancing organizational justice is an efficient strategy to decrease intention to leave or reduce turnover rates and, therefore, increase service quality and clients' satisfaction (DeConinck & Bachmann, 2005; Foley, Ngo, & Wong, 2005; Kickul, Lester, & Finkl, 2002; Parker & Kohlmeyer, 2005). …