Improving Organizational Climate with Design Team Interventions

Background and purpose:

Ongoing research to address workforce issues in the child welfare system shows organizational climate is a key aspect of workforce stability.  Organizational climate impacts workers’ commitment to their agency and investment in their job.  Climate also influences job satisfaction and workers’ intent to stay or leave their current position.  Organizational climate is furthermore associated with the ability of an organization to successfully implement new innovations, such as evidence-based practice models.  The purpose of this study is to test if the design team intervention, shown to improve worker’s job satisfaction and intent to stay, can also improve the climate of child welfare organizations.

Methods:

This study employs a multi-site longitudinal design to examine the effect of a design team intervention on organizational climate.  Working with a statewide partner, project staff recruited thirteen private, not-for-profit child welfare agencies from one state to participate in a design team intervention to address workforce needs.  A total of 407 workers from those agencies responded to a survey that measures worker perceptions of the psychological climate of their organization using the Parker et al. Psychological Climate Survey (2003), which has been validated for use with private child welfare agencies.  Three of the agencies then fully implemented a change initiative using the design team intervention while the other ten either did not complete the intervention or only partially implemented their change initiative.  Workers were surveyed again at the conclusion of the study period.  Data were analyzed with repeated measures analysis of variance to test the impact of the intervention on organizational climate.

Results:

Organizations that completed the design team intervention had statistically significant increases in three of the four dimensions of the Parker scale.  On the role dimension, significant change was noted on all three subscales on the interaction between Time 1 and Time 2 (ambiguity: p=0.012; conflict: p=0.04; overload: p=0.05).  On the organization dimension, the justice and support subscales had significant differences in the desired direction (i.e., those not getting the intervention deteriorated while those who did improved) (justice:  p=0.05; support: p=0.03).  On the supervisor dimension, significant change was again observed in the desired direction for both the goal emphasis and work facilitation subscales (goal emphasis: p=0.02; work facilitation: p=0.00).

Conclusions and Implications:

This research adds to the literature on effective interventions for organizational practice with child welfare agencies. Study findings support the use of design teams as an intervention that positively impacts the climate of not-for-profit child welfare agencies.  Although private agencies often operate in an environment of scare resources, design team interventions can be worth the investment of additional staff time and outside consultation. In addition, statistically significant improvements in the organizational climates of child welfare agencies suggests the benefit of future research to test the effectiveness of design team interventions in other service areas.  Finally, these findings build on implementation science by linking the ability of an organization to fully implement a change initiative to their capacity to improve the workplace climate for employees.