Job Burnout and Affective Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study of Burnout and Job Satisfaction Among Public Child Welfare Workers

Background: Although the antecedents to job burnout have been studied extensively among child welfare workers, few of those studies examine the impact of burnout on affective well-being.  Satisfaction derived from one’s job is an important aspect of quality of life and overall affective well-being. Workplace experiences that threaten the affective well-being of child welfare workers, such as job satisfaction, pose a hazard to child protection organizations as a whole. Though several gaps exist in the human service literature on job burnout and well-being, this study focuses on two important gaps in knowledge pertaining to the relationship between burnout and well-being among child welfare workers. The present study tests the consequences of burnout on affective well-being, an area of research that has received limited attention in child welfare workforce studies.  The purpose of this study is to investigate the interrelationships between demands, burnout and job satisfaction across time while taking into account the influence of resources (e.g. social support and specialized child welfare training) on those interrelationships.

Method: This study employs three-wave longitudinal panel design spanning a twelve-month timeframe to examine the impact of burnout on job satisfaction. Data were collected from an availability sample of 361 public child welfare workers. Three (3) multi-group path analysis models, a form of structural equation modeling that simultaneously tests multivariate interrelationships of observed variables, were performed using IBM SPSS AMOS 18. 

Results: Findings from the multi-group path models suggest that the type and level of job resource moderates the relationship between job demands, burnout and job satisfaction.  Job demands had diverging effects on several relationships in the model with the exception of two relationships. The relationship between emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction were consistent across all groups and models. This finding suggests that regardless of social support and specialized training, emotional exhaustion is positively related to depersonalization and negatively related to job satisfaction.  All models demonstrated good model fit.

Discussion/implications: Findings from the multi-group path models suggest that the type and level of job resource moderates the relationship between job demands, burnout and job satisfaction.  Several implications for social work administration and management practice can be drawn based on results from this study. When working towards the prevention of burnout development, a job demand that can be targeted is work-family conflict. Findings from this study suggest that conflict between work and family responsibilities can cause emotional exhaustion to begin to form. The implementation of non-traditional work structures that allow for greater flexibility can be used to help reduce the risk of workers experiencing conflict between the demands of their personal and professional lives. Furthermore, managers and administrators crafting workplace interventions that target a reduction of burnout should be focusing their efforts and protecting workers from emotional depletion. This may include workforce management interventions that protect workers’ emotional resources and interventions that will provide workers with added resources that may facilitate the process of fulfilling their work responsibilities.