© British Association of Social Workers
Job Satisfaction and Organizational Structure: A Comparative Study of Nine Social Service Departments
Andrew P. Kakabadse holds the degrees B.Sc. Hons (Salford) in Environmental Sciences and M.A. (Brunel) in Social and Public Administration, and also the Diploma in Psychiatric Social Work (Manchester). From a wide experience in several fields of social work be developed an interest in how organizations influence the attitude and behaviour of their employees and how they in turn influence clients or customers, community or markets. After a period as Research Fellow in the Department of Management, Manchester Polytechnic, studying the development of the post-Seebohm Social Service Departments, he was appointed Lecturer in Organization Behaviour in the Department where he established the Research and Development Unit. Current research interests are studying the organization effectiveness of social service departments in meeting client needs, and the provision of management training for fieldwork personnel and those in managerial positions.
Richard Worrall, B. A. Hons (Leeds) Political Studies, has researched into the effectiveness of middle-management training programmes for local government officers at the Institute of Local Government Studies, Birmingham University. He is now investigating the development of personal relationships within social service departments and the pattern of social worker/client relationships.
Summary
The authors investigated the relationship between aspects of organizational structure and job satisfaction as experienced by personnel employed in nine social service departments. After a series of unstructured interviews from 28 respondents in one authority, interview schedules were used for three distinct groups of 603 respondents in nine organizations: those making executive decisions, those making supervisory assessments and those primarily concerned with client interaction. The best predictors of organizational structure were dimensions of centralization and formalization which related significantly but negatively to job satisfaction. The relevance of these findings is discussed in relation to the rapid growth of social services and the effect it has had on social workers and other employees.