Collective Hope As a Unique Contributor to Lower Job Burnout Relative to Self-Care Activities and Perceived Organizational Support Among a Sample of Child Welfare Employees

Job burnout is well researched in the child welfare literature as a psychological state that is determinantal to child welfare employees that frequently results in higher turnover and declines in quality-of-service delivery. However, less is known about the antecedents of lower burnout. To better understand how to mitigate burnout in child welfare settings, we sought to test the contributions of collective hope (CH) to lower burnout. CH is a new construct with origins in Snyder’s Hope Theory, with CH describing an employee’s perceptions of their organization's ability to communicate clear goals, along with appraisals of their organization’s capacity to conceive pathway strategies to those goals while also generating the collective agency to navigate those pathways. To test the validity of CH as construct, we executed a survey study of child welfare supervisors (N = 230) in a single state in the US. Within the survey, we included the newly developed CH scale along with psychometrically suitable scales that measured individual differences in self-care activities and perceived organizational support (POS). Both self-care and POS were chosen for inclusion because in previous research, both have been linked to lower burnout. The data was analyzed using structural equation modeling to determine if CH was empirically distinct from both self-care and POS while also making a unique contribution to lower burnout. The results indicated that the model of CH as a distinct contributor to lower burnout exhibited good fit (X² = 467.01, p < .05; df = 184); RMSEA = .079 [90% CI: .07; .088]; CFI: .923). CH also exhibited a significant negative relationship with burnout (ß = -.29; p < .001). Such a result suggests that CH is indeed a psychological state worthy of future study for a better understanding of how to reduce burnout among child welfare workers.