Trust issues : Welfare workers' relationship to their organisation

Abstract: In the past decades, the public sector has undergone important organisational policy changes, referred to as New Public Management. These management strategies focus on continuous cost improvements and rationalisation of operations. In the aftermath of these policy changes, we have seen reports of increased work demands and less professional autonomy amongst welfare workers. Against this background, the thesis sets out to explore welfare workers’ relationship to their organisation. This was done by investigating how psychosocial and organisational factors related to a number of outcomes assumed to be indicators of the quality of the relationship. Theoretically, the thesis was inspired by psychological contract theory, but also relates to other concepts and theories found in organisational research. The thesis is based on four empirical studies, all of which relate to how welfare workers have perceived their relationship to their organisation.Study I aimed to qualitatively investigate how turnover processes evolved amongst statutory social workers who voluntarily had resigned from their jobs. The results showed that dismissive/admonishing organisational responses to the social workers’ perceived work-related dissatisfactions reinforced their beliefs in psychological contract violation, which led to resignation.Study II and III employed national web-based questionnaire data collected from employees and managers in the social services. The results of Studies II-III showed that if organisations want welfare workers to stop considering exit, want to counteract silence, want to reduce stress-related ill health and want to improve organisational commitment and job satisfaction, management strategies need to be developed that lead to fewer conflicting demands, a reasonable workload and a greater professional autonomy. The results also showed that the organisation’s open climate and attitude towards employees was of great importance for the studied outcome variables.Study IV was based on questionnaire data from different occupational groups in two municipal organisations. The results showed that organisational resources explained additional variance in organisational identification and organisational pride, beyond the contributions of workgroup resources.From the findings of this thesis, it can be concluded that the psychosocial demands need to be balanced with organisational resources in order to (re)build a trustworthy employee-organisation relationship. Further, organisations need to reconsider their human resource management strategies and practices, e.g., by enabling a continuous and open dialogue between the strategic and operational levels. Such changes may lead to balanced psychological contracts between welfare workers and the organisation that can improve the organisation’s stability, continuity and, ultimately, the quality of the welfare services.