Child Welfare Supervisors' Intent to Stay and Their Resignation Behavior

Background and Purpose: Supervisors play crucial roles in child welfare agencies. Supportive and skillful supervisors can increase retention among frontline staff, which in the long run, will lead to better outcomes among children and families involved in the child welfare system. However, existing studies on child welfare workforce focused on retention among frontline staff, while few studies focused on supervisors. It is important to examine factors related to retention among supervisors, since they might need some resources different from frontline staff to support their supervisory responsibilities. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by examining factors related to their intent to stay in child welfare, and the association between their intent to stay and their resignation behavior.

Methods: Data for this study come from National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment 2014-2019. Our sample includes 464 supervisors. A linear regression was conducted to model their intention to stay in child welfare. Independent variables include supervision for supervisors, professional sharing and support, time pressure, organizational climate, annual salary, social work degree, years of working in child welfare, gender, and race. The variables used in linear regression were extracted from baseline data collected in 2014-2015. A bivariate analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between intent to stay in child welfare reported at baseline and the actual resignation documented 3-3.5 years later at follow-up.

Results: Among the 464 supervisors, 445 (96%) responded to the intent to stay in child welfare scale at baseline. On average, their mean rating on the scale is 3.35, which shows low commitment to stay in child welfare (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree). The results from linear regression showed that perceiving professional sharing and support (β=.17, p<.01), perceiving the importance of their job (β=.15, p<.05), perceiving supportive climate in the agency (β=.19, p<.001), and having a social work degree (β=.13, p<.05) are positively associated with intent to stay in child welfare. As compared with white supervisors, black supervisors reported lower intent to stay (β= -.29, p<.01). By the time of follow-up, 24% of these supervisors resigned. Their intent to stay reported at baseline is associated with resignation. The ones with lower intent to stay at baseline are more likely to be resigned at follow-up.

Conclusion: Findings from this study highlight the benefits of professional sharing and support, perceiving the importance of their job, and supportive climate in the agency. Professional sharing and support among supervisors offer knowledge that goes beyond social work education and training, which can help supervisors effectively fulfill their supervisory responsibilities. Supervisors perceiving the importance of their job and supportive climate are more likely to feel fulfilled and valued, and therefore, are more committed to stay. In practice, agencies can create mechanisms such as peer mentoring programs for supervisors to share their professional experience and provide each other support. It is especially important to engage black supervisors in such programs to increase their retention rate.