The Impact Organizational Factors Have on Role Ambiguity Amongst School Social Workers

Background/Purpose: Research suggests that school social workers experience high levels of role ambiguity and lack support. In addition, research supports the notion that if a school creates a supportive work environment, the level of role ambiguity may decrease within school social work roles. Several organizational factors such as location, resources, supervision, internal communication, and employee engagement all play a role in supporting an employee as well as range in the level of support they create for a role within an organization. The study aims to explore what specific organizational factors increase or decrease role ambiguity amongst school social workers. The organizational factors that the study focused on were internal communication, supervision, and employee engagement as well as a potential moderating factor, organization tenure.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey design was used to provide a snapshot of the current organizational factors impacting the ambiguity of school social work roles from a sample of 73 members of the School Social Work Association of America. The Survey of Employee Engagement (SEE), the 3 factor Job Ambiguity Items Scale, and additional questions regarding location and demographic background were utilized in gathering data.

After collecting data, descriptive analyses were conducted to examine the sample characteristics and any patterns that might be found across different groups. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to examine which organizational factors impact role ambiguity as well as the level of impact the organizational factors have on role ambiguity after controlling for the demographic information.

Results: Data analysis revealed that the initial moderating factor, organizational tenure, did not show to have a moderating effect and was replaced with ‘job experience’ due to each factor having some conceptual similarity.

Descriptive analyses revealed that 87.7% of participants were female and 84.9% categorized their region as “suburban”. Job description percentages found that 42.5% felt they received a clear job description while 57.5% felt they did not. Descriptive statistics of major variables found that organizational factors were ranked moderately with a mean between 3 and 4 on a scale from 1 to 5, whereas, the overall job clarity mean was 5.39 on a scale from 1 to 7 with a standard deviation of 1.07.

Supervision and job experience were the only two factors that had an impact on role ambiguity. The moderating variable, job experience, showed to have a significant moderating effect on the impact internal communication and supervision had on role ambiguity. However, did not show to have a significant moderating effect on the impact employee engagement had on role ambiguity. In addition, job experience showed to have less of an impact over time as a moderating factor.

Conclusions/Implications: The implications of these findings recognized the importance of cultivating strong internal communication between professionals and clear guidance within supervision when creating a supportive working environment within practice. In addition to practice, areas of policy and research have opportunity to grow when exploring areas of support and standards for school social work roles such as inter-professional education, multidisciplinary teams, and or ethical conceptual frameworks.