Campus Location

Abilene Campus (Residential)

Date of Award

8-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Social Work

Degree Name

Master of Science

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Kyeonghee, Jang, Ph.D

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Alan J. Lipps, Ph.D

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Kari, White, LMSW

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to recognize and improve the understanding of social workers’ job satisfaction in the geriatric area. Low job satisfaction makes social workers want to move their field and change their career. The research is the conceptual model of the moderating effect of patient engagement. The hypothesis is that the organizational factors of this model (climate, workplace, pay, supervision) lead to low job satisfaction for social workers and the generation gap between Millennials and older generations will result in different job satisfaction. The assumption was that among the factors (climate, workplace, pay, supervision), salary has the strongest effect to impact job satisfaction for social workers, and Millennials will report significantly lower job satisfaction than older generations. However, the result came as an unexpected outcome. Data presented in this study is secondary data (University of Texas at Austin, n.d.), or Survey of Employee Engagement (SEE) collected by the Institute for Organizational Excellence (IOE), the University of Texas at Austin. The survey uses selection criteria which are selected from a working sample of geriatric practitioners: caseworkers and non-caseworkers who work for all regional offices and State office that provides adult protective services. The sample includes all employees of Adult Protective Services of all regional offices and state office in Texas (N = 622). The result is that job satisfaction was not different depending on the generation type or age and that salary did not have the strongest effect of all the organizational

factors on job satisfaction; however, the order was climate, workplace, pay, and supervision. The factors influenced job satisfaction, however, generation gap is not a significant issue. In order to improve job satisfaction for social workers, organizations will need more consideration of supporting factors (climate, workplace, pay, supervision) for enhancing high job satisfaction for social workers.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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