Eggs Conceived By the Red Flag: How Government Dependence Enhance Social Workers’ Performance in Social Service Organizations?

Background:

Evidence generally supports the assertion that government resource dependence helps to improve social service organizations’ performance. However, less attention has been allocated to assess the double-edged sword effects of government dependence to social service performance. On the one side, government dependence enables both government and social service organizations to develop comparative advantages. On the other side, the government dependence carries with bureaucratic pressures and strict administration of government, which can lead to social service organization’s loss of discretion and autonomy. To fill this gap, this paper investigates the effect of organizational characteristics to social workers’ service performance, via organizational identity and role ambiguity.

Method:

The data was adopted from the China Social Work Longitudinal Study in 2019. This survey used a multistage random sampling method to cover 57 cities. It was the first large-scale, continuous sampling survey and research project in China focusing on the development and trends of social work. According to the research objectives, 53 social work organizations and 1,133 social workers were included in the sample. The sample is predominantly female (81.2% female; 18.8% male), the average age was 29.69 years old, 456 (40.25%) were graduated from social work degree; 716 (63.22%) had bachelor’s degree; and the average working year in social work was 3.94 (SD = 3.65).

Our analyses followed a conventional two-step strategy associated with structural equation modelling. First, we used confirmatory factor analysis with maximum likelihood estimation to test a measurement model for examining the construct validity of the latent variables proposed. Second, we built a structural equation model and tested it to examine the direct and indirect relationships among the three latent variables and thereby to consider the mediation hypotheses. The moderating effects of explicit and implicit government resource dependence were further tested using multiple-group analyses. The analyses were conducted using SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0 software and conventional indices employed to assess model fit.

Results:

We found that explicit governmental resource played a moderating role in the relationship between frontline social workers’ organizational identity and role ambiguity, as indicated by the z-score (-2.088**). We further found that implicit governmental resource played a moderating role in the relationship between frontline social workers’ organizational identity and role ambiguity, as indicated by the z-score (-1.716*). In addition, We also found that implicit governmental resource played a moderating role in the relationship between frontline social workers’ organizational identity and services impact, as indicated by the z-score (-1.84*).

Conclusions:

Our study testifies to the effectiveness of explicit and inexplicit government dependence in social service industry. Specifically, for organizations with explicit governmental resource, more attention should be paid to the mechanism of how organizational identity influences role ambiguity of service providers. For organizations with inexplicit governmental resource, role ambiguity should be focused more to improve service performance. With the summarization of double-edged sword effects of governmental resource, this research verifies the advantages of government resources dependence under the Chinese management system.