Quality Wins: The Cross-Level Impact of Organizational Leadership on Social Work Service Quality Under the Context of Governance

Background: The professional service quality of social work is highly valued. Previous research has discussed social worker personality,ability, and organizational culture and leadership, but most of the research focuses on a single level,few attempts have been made to conduct cross-level research on social work service quality, which results in a lack of multi-dimensional thinking on how to improve social work service quality and a lack of corresponding approaches. To address this issue, this study uses social identity theory as guidance to analyze the interaction of organizational leadership, professional identity, and service quality and provide recommendations for sustained deepening of social worker's service quality.

Methods: This study used statistical analysis methods and relied on the data sample collected from the "China Social Work Longitudinal Survey (CSWLS)".Based on factors such as registration date, employment date, and scale, a sample frame of 979 social work institutions and 6,776 social workers was selected, and ultimately 226 social work institutions and 3,194 social workers were identified as research samples.The SPSS 25.0 and HLM 6.08 statistical analysis software was utilized to analyze the mechanism of interaction between organizational, professional identity and social service quality.

Findings: The analysis found that among the 3194 social worker samples, 1305 and 1365 expressed moderate satisfaction (accounting for 40.9%) and little satisfaction (accounting for 42.7%) with life and work respectively. The analysis based on social identity theory found that organizational leadership has multiple structural tensions on the influence of professional identity. Correlation analysis shows that the correlation coefficient between professional identity and service quality, professional identity and leadership, and service quality and leadership are 0.414, 0.068, and 0.053, respectively, all showing significant positive correlation at the 0.01 level. Conclude through further analysis using hypothesis testing, organizational leadership can positively predict social worker professional identity level (γ=0.03, p<0.05) and service quality level (γ=0.03, p<.05). Also, social worker professional identity can positively predict service quality levels(γ=0.41, p<0.001), and plays a partial mediating effect in the process of the effect of organizational leadership on the service quality at the individual level(γ=0.03, p<0.05).

Conclusion and Application: The study's results emphasize the structural significance of organizational leadership and professional identity for social work service quality. This study believes that social work organizations, social workers, leadership, social work industry, and government, need to work together to improve service quality. Social work organizations need to optimize the organization's culture to provide institutional protection for service quality. Social workers need to actively strengthen professional learning, and enhance their sense of professional identity at the individual level. The leadership needs to pay attention to exerting high-quality organizational leadership, enhancing the effectiveness of leadership through many innovative approaches. At the same time, the social work industry needs to promote the standardization of the social work industry and enhance industry service efficiency. Finally, the government needs to pay attention to the phenomenon of "inequity" within the industry,and provide effective supply for improving the quality of social work professional services from the perspective of institutional environment.