Child Welfare and Social Work Employees (Research Paper Sample)

Causes and Antecedents to Retention and Turnover among Child Welfare and Social Work Employees
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INTRODUCTION
Description of the problem
Employee retention in child welfare and social services agencies is of great concern. The high turnover rate of these professional workers has posted major challenges to child welfare agencies and other agencies who are concerned with the welfare of vulnerable groups like the old, the sick, and the poor who need great services for this group of professionals. Social works is an academic discipline and profession whose main goal is to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of individuals, groups, community and the entire population (Abdallah, 2009). They perform this role through direct practice, organizing the communities, policy, research, teaching, and crisis interventions. Their research and practices is always concerned with the counselling, social policy, psychotherapy, social program evaluation, and community development. Social workers are organized into local, national, regional, and global professional bodies ( Acker & Lawrence, 2009). The field in-cooperate psychology, anthropology, politics, philosophy, medicine, law, sociology, education and economics.
Despite all these important roles social workers are expected to perform, there have been high cases of turnover among child welfare and social works employees. The retention rate is so low while the rate of people who are leaving or planning to leave the profession continues to increase day by day. Several research articles have shown that more than 43 percent of social workers in community mental health departments and 39 percent of social workers in family services are very likely to leave their jobs within the next two years (Abdallah, 2009). The findings also reports that there is 5o percent yearly turnover rate among mental health workers at the community, and over 6o percent turnover rate each year among the general human services workers ( Acker & Lawrence, 2009). This study therefore intends to investigate the causes and antecedents to retention and turnover among child Welfare and social work employees.
Significance of the problem and the rationale of studying it
The current high employees turnover rate does not imply well with consistency, quality, and stability of services provided to the people who use social works and child welfare services. Turnover can have detrimental effects on staff members and clients who have remain to give and receive quality services when senior positions have been vacated and are filled with inexperienced personnel. Moreover, high turnover rate is likely to cause mistrust of the clients to the system and at the same time can demoralized other workers from remaining or to enter into the field (Acker & Lawrence, 2009). Yet, there have been very few studies which have been undertaken to assess the causes and antecedents of this high turnover and low retention of child welfare and social works employees in different industries. In addition to that, there has been no attempt to pull the existing few studies so as to identify the major trends that are emerging in the rate of turnover of the employees (Abdallah, 2009). This study therefore have a lot of significance in that it will investigate the causes and the precedents of high turnover and low retention of child welfare and social works employees (Mor, Nissly & Levin, 2001).At the same time, it will pull together all the empirical studies which have been done on the same topic so as to evaluate the emerging trends in social works employees turnover so as to come up with recommendations and solutions to this problem (Thaden, Jacobs-Priebe & Evans, 2010). Understanding the causes and the antecedents of the high turnover must be the first step for any action taken for the purpose of reducing the current high turnover rate (Mor, Nissly & Levin, 2001).So, this study will be significantly important to the employers in the social works fields since they will be able to know the factors that motivate their workers and the factors that cause them to leave (Bride & Kintzle, 2011). Employers will understand how these factors are associated with each employee characters and the nature of the general work process over which they might have great control over.
c. Purpose of the proposed study
The purpose of this study is to assess the causes and the antecedents of high turnover and low retention of child welfare and social works employees. The effects of such high employees turnover rates is also going to be investigated in details by the use of peer review articles which have contents on the topic. Based on the findings of the study, a recommendation will be generated which will help curb the high rate of social works employees turnover. The recommendations from the study will be useful to the employers since it will highlight the situation on the ground and give a possible solution for the same. That is to say, the study will come up with suggestions to the solutions of ensuring high retention and low turnover of child welfare and social works employees ( Acker & Lawrence, 2009). The study will use a systematic literature review in the analysis and synthesis of empirical evidence on antecedents and causes to turnover in order to identify reasons for the turn over by the employees, the grouping of those reasons and how the reasons are important in determining the employees’ actions (Mor, Nissly & Levin, 2001).

LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
Numerous articles have been chosen, gathered and assessed to place more emphasis on causes and antecedents to retention and turnover among child welfare and social work employees all the articles have undergone critical review to ensure that only relevant and high quality literatures are involved in this study. This chapter provides the main content of the study. It describes the main findings from previous scholarly studies, based on the causes of high turnover and low retention of social works employees.
Summary of the previous study
The Significance of Employee Turnover
High social employees turnover have been a major problem for several decades because it interferes with efficiency and effectiveness of the deliverance of services. In 2004, a study on staff losses in family and child welfare service agencies reported that the high rate of staff turnover and low retention is always detrimental to their efforts on provision of effective social services to clients (Bride & Kintzle, 2011). The study highlighted two reasons for this effect. One, it is unproductively time consuming and costly, and two, it is responsible for the weary cycle in the recruitment, orientation, production and retention of employees in the system hence giving a bad reputation on social works profession (Bride & Kintzle, 2011). Employee turnover may also disrupt service delivery to the clients who might be in need of search services. Apart from this, such movement also demoralizes the remaining staffs who in most cases are forced to work with new incompetent personnel hence rendering the services of the social work profession to be of low quality.
Researchers group the direct cost of employee high turnover and low retention into three main categories. These are the separation cost (administration, unemployment tax, separation pay, functions related to termination, administration, and exist interviews), replacement cost (advertising job vacancy, administrative actions during the pre-employment period, exams and interviews), and training cost (job instructions and formal classroom training) (Caringi, Strolin-Goltzman, Lawson, McCarthy, Briar-Lawson & Claiborne, 2008). The indirect cost associated with high turnover and low retention of employees are more complicated and include loss or reduction on the efficiency and the effectiveness of the industry as a whole, loss of trust by the clients on the profession, and less productivity because the new employees will require time to master their job responsibilities fully ( Acker & Lawrence, 2009). The impact of the turnover on the client can be more detrimental since a direct care staff plays very significance role in the determination of the quality of care. This might be more severe in the child welfare agencies where children only count on the workers they regularly interact with (Abdallah, 2009). Turnover has the possibility of causing decline of report and trust resulting into the dissatisfaction of the client with the services of that agency (Mahmoud, Douglas & Rebecca, 2010). Turnover problems can be too much especially in agency where the quality of services delivered relies mainly on the human capital (knowledge, ability, and the skills of the employees) (Caringi, Strolin-Goltzman, Lawson, McCarthy, Briar-Lawson & Claiborne, 2008). This can result into a negative impact on the wellbeing of families, communities, children and women who are under the social agency care (Behnke, MacDermid, Anderson & Weiss, 2010).
Cause and Antecedents to Turnover—Empirical Findings
Empirical studies of different literature indicate that there are three major causes and antecedents of turnout among the human service workers. These include (1) demographic factors including both works related and personal; (2) professional perceptions, including job satisfaction and organizational commitment; and (3) organizational conditions such as organization culture and fairness on matters of compensation in relation to diversity(Behnke, MacDermid, Anderson & Weiss, 2010).
Demographic Factors
Demographic factors are the most conclusive and common predictors found within literatures related to turnover. Several studies have found tenure with the organ...