Surviving the Bureaucracy

Abstract

In addition to their role as clinical mentors, direct service supervisors play a critical role in maintaining the organization stability and service continuity in public human service agencies. Despite the stresses inherent in these functions, middle management supervisors, as a group, experience a surprisingly long job tenure. Are they the burned out bureaucrats so often depicted in the popular media, or do they experience offsetting satisfactions that mitigate against the demands of their roles? Given the pivotal organizational role of these human service professionals, it is important to identify those components of job satisfaction that might serve to support and sustain them as a way of improving service delivery and agency functioning so critical to the welfare of at-risk populations. This paper reports the findings from a study of 70 direct service supervisors employed in the public child welfare system of a major Metropolitan Area. Correlation and regression analyses are used to examine the effect a number of personal, job task, and organizational factors have on the supervisors' job satisfaction. Length of time in current position, emotional exhaustion, race, amount of time spent collaborating with other professionals, and organizational climate (i.e., quality of trust among professional personnel) were found to have significant net associations with job satisfaction. The five significant predictor variables accounted for 49% of the variance in the supervisors' job satisfaction scores. The implications of the findings for direct service supervisors and public human service agencies are discussed.

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