The Mediating Role of Inclusion in the Context of Organizational Diversity: A Longitudinal Study of Leader-Member Exchange and Diversity Climate On Job Satisfaction and Intention to Leave Among Child Welfare Workers

Background: Understanding organizational diversity is central to addressing issues of inequality and justice both locally and globally. While studies examining ways to create a more stable workforce for child welfare organizations abounds, limited research has been focused on the impact of diversity climate and inclusion on worker satisfaction and intentions to leave. Utilizing theories of symbolic interaction, reference group and social identity, we tested a conceptual model of the relationships between diversity characteristics, leader-member exchange, diversity climate, perception of inclusion and job satisfaction and intention to leave the job among public child welfare workers.

Method: The current study uses 134 employees from the first two waves of data of an original three-wave longitudinal design.  The sample was diverse with 31% Caucasian, 29% Latino, 22% African American, 12% Asian and 6% in the mixed racial/ethnic category. Data were collected at six-month intervals, beginning in 2004 from a large public child welfare agency located in the western region of the United States. Existing measures with demonstrated validity and reliability were used for all constructs. A two-wave path analysis using Proc Calis in SAS was employed. Our model examined diversity climate and leader-member exchange for wave one, controlling for diversity characteristics, and perception of inclusion, job satisfaction and intention to leave in wave two of the data.

 

Results: Controlling for diversity characteristics for the first wave of the data, we found significant direct paths between leader-member exchange to diversity climate (β= .20, t= 2.47, p= .02), diversity climate to perception of inclusion (β= .23, t= 2.74, p= .01), diversity climate to job satisfaction (β= .17, t= 2.11, p= .05) and inclusion to job satisfaction (β= .31, t= 3.97, p=.0007). The findings also include several key indirect effects: leader-member exchange (LMX) had a significant positive indirect effect to job satisfaction through inclusion (β= .08, t= 2.02, p= .04), diversity climate had a significant positive indirect effect to job satisfaction through inclusion (β= .07, t= 2.24, p= .03), diversity climate had a significant negative effect to intention to leave through both inclusion (β= .06, t= -2.06, p= .04) and job satisfaction (β= -.12, t= -2.11, p= .04), and, inclusion had a significant negative indirect effect to employee intention to leave through job satisfaction (β= -.21, t= -3.70, p= .0002). Our analysis yielded model fit statistics that suggest a good overall model fit (e.g. χ² = 28.95, p = .115; GFI = .97; RMSEA = .05).

 

Discussion/implications: Results highlight some of the key ingredients that impact job satisfaction and intention to leave among child welfare workers and indicate pathways in which leader-member exchange, diversity climate and inclusion impact these outcomes. This study has important implications for designing workplace interventions that improve the functioning of diverse workforces, particularly for child welfare organizations. Some of the main findings are the first to illustrate how organizational climates of diversity and inclusion both directly and indirectly impact job satisfaction and intention to leave, providing insight into organizational factors that can be a target for workplace interventions.