The child welfare workforce is charged with the demanding work of ensuring the safety, well-being, and permanency of maltreated children. Although child welfare work can be rewarding, it is also associated with high levels of stress and burnout, causing challenges to retain staff. Developing organizational cultures and climates within child welfare agencies that are supportive of the workforce and strive to improve outcomes is essential. Applying the ecological systems theory to a child welfare agency provides for an understanding that the agency is comprised of different levels of systems with interactions between the systems. This study examined the association between the individual level factors of job satisfaction, coping skills, self-efficacy, burnout, job stress, and individual affect with organizational level factors including culture and climate. Child welfare workers from one regional area were invited to participate in an online survey utilizing the Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale. Results indicate that there is an association between each of the individual level factors and the organizational factors. The importance of the role of individual affect was highlighted in the results in that the level of affect reported was associated with corresponding ratings of the perception of the organizational culture and climate. These results provide implications for hiring, training, mentoring, and supervision. This study attempted to assess if the organizational culture and climate of individual child welfare units could be linked to permanency outcomes. This linkage was not possible in this study, however implications to conduct this type of research are made. Advancing the study of organizational culture and climate beyond the impact of such factors as job satisfaction and retention to linking to direct client outcomes is an emerging and important field of research.
Published frameworks were utilized to identify SB practices in use, and the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to identify dimensions of culture. Data from 1021 Corporate Sustainability Reports from 212 companies worldwide was collected for computerized text analysis, which provided a measure of the occurrence of a specific SB practice and the four dimensions of the CVF. Hypotheses were analyzed using cluster, crosstab, and t-test statistical methods.
The findings contribute significant insights to the Business and Sustainability field. Firstly, clustering of SB practice bundles identified organizations at various levels of SB practice awareness. The spectrum runs from a compliance level of awareness, to a set of organizations aware of the importance of culture change for sustainability. Top performing clusters demonstrated different priorities with regards to SB practices; these were in many cases, related to contextual factors, such as location or sector. This implies that these organizations undertook varying sustainability strategies, but all arrived at some successful level of sustainability. Another key finding was the association between the highest performing SB practice clusters and a culture dominated by Adhocracy values, corroborating theories presented in the literature, but were not empirically tested before.
The results of this research offer insights into the use of text analysis to study SB practices and organizational culture. Further, this study presents a novel attempt at empirically testing the relationship between SB practices and culture, and tying this to financial performance. The goal is that this work serves as an initial step in redefining the way in which businesses adopt SB practices. A transformation of SB practice adoption will lead to major improvements in sustainability strategies, and subsequently drive change for improved corporate sustainability.
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants, collectively termed advanced practice providers (APPs), report a lack of onboarding and professional support which has been shown to lead to job dissatisfaction, high turnover rates, professional attrition, and gaps in patient care; wasting billions of healthcare dollars and falling short of the Quadruple Aim. A time-honored, integral means of support in many industries is mentorship. This is a dynamic, evolving relationship between an experienced professional and a novice professional that promotes knowledge application, systems navigation, organizational socialization and personal role integration.
Unfortunately, healthcare organizations have been slow to adopt mentorship, as evidenced by the paucity of studies on mentorship programs in health care, and APP turnover rates twice that of physicians. This evidenced-based project expands on the limited existing studies regarding the associations between mentorship and organizational commitment, as well as explores the desired characteristics of quality mentors and perceived barriers to APP mentorship.
A survey of multispecialty APPs at an oncology practice within a larger, multi-state integrated healthcare delivery system reveals access to mentors and time are the biggest barriers. The most desired mentorship characteristics are professional knowledge and motivational support. Career development through mentorship can increase job satisfaction and retention, as well as improve the quality of care provided by APPs. By strengthening the professional foundations, patients will benefit with continuity of care, improved quality measures, and efficient systems communication reaching the Quadruple Aim targets.