Compassion Satisfaction Among Social Work Practitioners: The Role of Work-Life Balance

Background/Purpose:Social work practitioners frequently engage in high-stress work with high demands and limited resources-factors that increase their risk of experiencing job-related psychological distress and burnout. Understanding factors that both contribute to and prevent burnout is necessary for the well-being of the profession. However, despite strong empirical evidence establishing a relationship between social work and burnout, there is a limited body of literature that has adopted the profession’s strength’s based paradigm by focusing on identifying factors that prevent or reduce the propensity for burnout among social workers, such as work autonomy, work-life balance, emotional intelligence, and compassion satisfaction. Based on these identified gaps in literature, thepurpose of this study is to examine whether emotional intelligence, work autonomy, and work-life balance influence the compassion satisfaction of social work practitioners.

Methods: This quantitative study used survey data collected from 120 social work practitioners to examine individual and organizational factors associated with compassion satisfaction, including work autonomy, work-life balance, and emotional intelligence. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between the continuous dependent variable, compassion satisfaction, and the independent variables (i.e., emotional intelligence, work autonomy, work-life balance) while controlling for sociodemographic characteristics.

Results:Multiple regression analyses revealed that the higher levels of emotional intelligence(B= 0.729,p< .001), perceived work autonomy(B= 1.442,p< .01), and perceived work-life balance (Personal Life Interference with Work, B= -3.024, p < .01; Work/Personal Life Enhancement, B = 2.953, p < .001)are associated with an increase in compassion satisfaction among experienced, licensed social work practitioners. Particularly, in the integrated model which included all three independent variables simultaneously, work-life balance was significantly and mostly associated with compassion satisfaction among social workers (Personal Life Interference with Work, B= -3.043, p < .01; Work/Personal Life Enhancement, B = 2.534, p < .01). These findings suggest that a social worker’s perceived ability to successfully balance personal and work responsibilities can increase levels of compassion satisfaction.

Conclusions and Implications: This study contributes to a richer understanding of what factors contribute to compassion satisfaction among social workers. Examining compassion satisfaction shifts the narrative to a strengths-based perspective focused on what keeps social workers in the profession, and this knowledge can be used to increase retention. The findings suggested that at the individual level, social workers should be encouraged to cultivate emotional intelligence as not only a relevant practice skill, but also a protective factor that may increase professional longevity. At the organizational level, findings suggested that organizations that employ social workers should be particularly sensitive to issues of autonomy and work-life balance. Employers should consider how to allow social workers more independence in decision making and more control over their work, while also providing supportive work environments that minimize conflicts between personal life and work demands.