Why Do They Leave? Modeling Social Workers' Organizational and Occupational Turnover Intentions in China

Background/Objectives: The agenda of ‘building 1.45 million social workers by 2020’ was considered a very important means to professionalize social work in China. Compared with some developed countries, the emerging country- and city-level statistics in China have indicated higher turnover rate. The instability of social work staffing may also have negative implications for the quality, consistency, and stability of the provision of social services, which may eventually challenge the professionalization of social work. Research shows that many factors influence staff turnover and intention to leave. However, no Chinese study has yet tried to capture which factors have significant influence on, or are determinant for, social workers’ turnover intention by differentiating two types of turnover intention—organizational and occupational. The present study is a first attempt to shed light on modeling Chinese social workers’ organizational and occupational turnover intentions by focusing on individual and organizational level variables.  

Methods: Data was collected among social workers in Jiangmen City, Guangdong province by paper-based questionnaires. Structural equation modeling was used to unravel the mechanism among three key latent variables (Individual level—job satisfaction and burnout and organizational level—fairness). First, two structural model was built to examine the direct and indirect effects of social workers’ job satisfaction and fairness on their organizational and occupational turnover intentions as well as the mediating effect of burnout. Furthermore, the moderation effect of their work setting was also examined.

Results: There are 318 social workers participating in the studies. The profile of social workers is 76.7% female, mean age of 31, 42.1% unmarried, 44.5% with child, and the mean monthly salary around USD 404.

Fit indexes of the two structural models showed adequate model fit (CFI =.932, RMSEA =.057, R² = .44 for organizational turnover intention while CFI =.928, RMSEA =.063, R² = .49 for occupational turnover intention). First, burnout had a full mediation effect on the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. Secondly, their work setting (working in social work agency or in community) played a moderator role in the relationships between job satisfaction and burnout in the two models, indicating by Z-score (1.83, p<0.1 for the organizational turnover intention model and 2.106, p<0.05 for the occupational turnover intention model). Third, it should be highlighted that fairness only significantly predicted organizational turnover intention rather than occupational turnover intention. 

Conclusion/implication: This study shows the importance of burnout in the prediction of turnover intention, pointing out the different magnitude job satisfaction impacts on burnout in different work settings, and highlighting the key impact of fairness in the organizational turnover process. This results enriched our theoretical understanding of social workers’ turnover intention through social exchange and equity perspectives. Chinese social workers’ turnover intention is a comparatively new research area due to the recent re-emergence of social work there. The understanding about why they leave and where they leave for (other social work agencies or other professions) would be very useful for designing pattern-sensitive intervention programs for retaining social workers in China.