The effect of professionalism on Social Inclusion Orientation among social service organizations: moderating effect of organizational culture

Background and Purpose:

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the professionalism of social welfare organization affects the social inclusion orientation, assessing the moderating effect of organizational culture.

Methods:

The professionalism of social welfare organization means the percentage of the programs carried out by professionals among all the programs in the social service organization.

The concept of social inclusion orientation implies the degree of efforts made by a social service organization to promote social inclusion of its clients. The measurement of social inclusion orientation consists of two sub-dimensions, 'Client-Centered Social Inclusion: CTSI' and 'Community-Centered Social Inclusion: COSI'. CTSI, focusing on the client's needs, means the degree of efforts made by the social service organization to promote the client's social inclusion through its services. It is measured with 20 items. COSI refers to the degree of efforts made by the social service organization to promote the client's social inclusion by improving the community environment the client is located in. It is measured with 20 items.

The measurement of organizational culture consists of four sub-dimensions, 'group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, rational culture. it was developed by Kimberly & Quinn(1984). It is measured with 16 items.

For this study, the social service organizations in Korea were classified into 4 types of 'Children•youth centers', 'organizations for disabled', 'organizations for the aged', and 'community social service centers', and the surveys were carried out on one manager of mid-level or higher. The Social Inclusion Team of the Social Welfare Center of Yonsei University has collected data from 809 institutions which includes centers for Children&Youth, for disabled, for the aged and community social service centers. The data collected in the first year research was used in this study for secondary data analysis. The analysis method of multiple regression using SPSS 12.0 was applied.

Results:

In this study, the moderating effect of group culture(p<.05)and development culture(p<.05) between the professionalism and COSI of social welfare organizations was found. It means that the effect of professionalism on COSI through community improvement increases as the levels of group culture and development culture get higher.

According to the results, between the professionalism and CTSI, only the hierarchical culture(p<.05) showed the moderating effect. First, professionalism has more significant effect on CTSI in organizations with higher level of hierarchical culture than in the systems with lower level of hierarchical culture. Second, in the institutions with higher level of professionalism, hierarchical culture affect positively between the professionalism and CTSI, while the effect of hierarchical culture is negative in the organizations with lower level of professionalism.

Conclusions and Implications:

The results of this study will be able to provide the important guidelines for social welfare organizations to achieve social inclusion of socially excluded groups.

Also, how the organizational culture and professionalism have to function in the social welfare organizations to provide more effective services to various groups of socially excluded will be acquired through the results.