Child welfare worker intent to leave: Examining the impacts of individual factors and workers’ perceptions of organizational cultural competence.

Abstract

The primary goal of the current research was to examine the impact of child welfare workers’ individual factors and child welfare workers' perceptions of organizational cultural competence on child welfare workers' intent to leave the child welfare system. This study is a secondary analysis of data from a longitudinal study, Building a Stable, Supported Workforce: A Comprehensive Workforce Project with New York’s Voluntary Agencies. This research is grounded by empowerment theory, with a specific focus on the importance of self-efficacy and perceptions of power. Previous studies on child welfare worker turnover have focused on the more overt factors that predict turnover. The results of this study contribute to the knowledge about child welfare workforce turnover by considering the impact of race as it relates to organizational cultural competence. This research includes workers from thirteen private child welfare agencies (n=920). The bivariate analyses revealed that the individual factors of age, level of education, salary level, and marital status were all found to be significantly related to the variable of intent to leave. The results of the SEM models confirmed that a mixture of child welfare workers’ individual factors and child welfare workers’ perceptions of organizational cultural competence were included in the best fitting model that considered the latent factor of the “looking” dimension of the intent to leave scale.