The Influence of Teamwork on Social Workers' Organization Commitment in Seoul, South Korea

Purpose:  

The purpose of community social welfare centers in Seoul, South Korea is to provide welfare services for local residents and solutions for resolving municipal issues. Since 1975, the number of community social welfare centers has increased from 22 to 437 in 2012 (Korea Association of Social Welfare Centers, 2013). This expansion brought about debate on the quality of the social welfare system and discussions about the effectiveness, efficiency, and importance of human resource management in social welfare organizations (Choi and Yoon, 2014). To manage social welfare systems more efficiently, social workers became more team-oriented; nevertheless, research progress on social workers’ teamwork in Korea is extremely limited. Organizational commitment is one of the main factors that influence the social workers’ tasks, the environment, the quality of service, and the outcome. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of teamwork on the emotional, normative and maintenance aspects of oragnizaitonal commitment of social workers.

Methods:

Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey design. 82 social workers who worked for social welfare centers in Seoul Korea responded to a structural survey. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to determine the influence of teamwork on the general organization commitment and on each category of organization commitment including emotional, normative and maintenance organization commitment. Control variables, included gender, income, marital status, position, level of education, period of service, level of satisfaction, and growth needs strength.

The independent variable is teamwork. The instrument used to measure of the teamwork is based on Coyle-Shapiro’s criterion (1995), α = 0.910. The dependent variables are three subcategories of the organization commitment: emotional, normative, and maintenance organization commitment. The instrument to measure these variables is based on Allen and Meyer (1990), α =0.851. The control variables that influence organization commitment are gender, income, marital status, position, level of education, the period of service, the level of satisfaction(The Korean Social Workers Association(2000), α =0.757), and the growth needs strength (Hackman and Oldham(1976), α = 0.852).

Results:

Controlling for all other variables teamwork positively influenced general organization, R² =0.46,  p<.05. emotional, R² =0.43, p<.001, and normative R² = 0.41, p<.05 aspects of the social workers’ organization commitment. The teamwork also positively influenced the maintenance aspect of the social workers’ organization commitment, R²=0.19, p<.1 which approaches signficance.

Implications:

The population of this study is confined to community social welfare centers in Seoul, South Korea. Therefore, the survey does not include social workers’ opinions in the other geographical areas in Korea.

In this study, teamwork was used as independent variable and emotional, normative, maintenance organization commitment as dependent variables. For the future studies, we recommend the classification of the teamwork and the organization commitment into various employers who have different roles in welfare centers so that we can clearly identify how to manage the social welfare centers to enhance teamwork, which has positive influence on the organization commitment.