Pull and Push: The Effect of Social Support and Professional Resilience on the Relationship between Probation Social Workers' Cynicism and Service Impact

Background:

Probation social workers experience great level of cynicism and job pressure, and that will lead to poor service performance during their probation work. To improve probation social workers’ service impact, the protective influences of social support and professional resilience have been explored. However, few investigations are conducted to identify their interactions simultaneously. This research fills this gap by examining the impact of social support on the relationship between cynicism and service impact, and investigating the influence of professional resilience on the relationship between cynicism and service impact, among probation social workers.

Method:

This study adopted the data from an online Survey of Chinese Social Workers collected in 2018. To serve our research purposes, we focused on the front-line probation social workers (N = 382), who provide probation services in Chinese legal system. The sample is predominantly female (61.5% female; 38.5% male), their mean age was 32.47 years old (SD = 8.239), 38.2% had educational background in social work (N = 146), 75.1% had social work licensing (N = 287), and 48.4% were working for social work agencies (N = 185).

A confirmatory factor analysis was first conducted to guarantee the scale validity and reliability. Second, structural equation modeling was used to further test the hypothesized model. Third, the moderation effects of professional resilience were further tested by multiple-group analyses (high resilience group compared with low resilience group). SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0 were used for data analysis.

Results:

Results indicated that frontline probation social workers’ cynicism was significantly and negatively associated with service impact (β = -0.20***), and their cynicism was also significantly and negatively associated with social support (β = -0.39***). In addition, their social support was significantly and positively associated with service impact (β = 0.68***). We also found that probation social workers’ professional resilience plays a moderating role in the relationship between their cynicism and their service impact, as indicated by the z-score (-1.579*). Specifically, the negative effect of the relationship between their cynicism and service impact was much stronger among the frontline probation social workers who had lower resilience (β = -0.184**) than among those who had higher resilience (β = -0.072). In addition, the probation social workers’ professional resilience did play a moderating role in the relationship between their perception of social support and their service impact, as indicated by the z-score (-3.271***).

Conclusions:

Findings suggest that social support functioned as an extrinsic pull mediating the relationship between probation social workers’ cynicism and service impact, while professional resilience served as an intrinsic push moderating the impact of social support and cynicism on service impact, respectively. The push and pull mechanism in the present study provides tentative recommendations for the alleviation of probation social workers’ job pressure and improvement of their service impact. This study advances current knowledge about the relationship between social support, service impact, cynicism, and professional resilience.