Session: Mapping Pathways from Organizational Democracy to Workforce Health and Well-Being In Child Welfare (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

This symposium directly responds to this year’s SSWR theme by proposing organizational democracy as a promising framework for enhancing workforce health and well-being in child welfare and other human service settings. Organizational democracy is conceptualized as a multidimensional, multilevel construct encompassing practices, structures, and processes that expand workers’ power to influence organizational decisions and activities. Previous research has shown its potential benefits, but these benefits are often resource-intensive, contextual, and sometimes limited. Therefore, it is critical to examine whether organizational democracy is worth the investment and to identify which elements are beneficial for specific workforce outcomes. This symposium brings together four presentations that map how specific democratic elements across structural, cultural, and interpersonal levels create multiple pathways to workforce health and well-being.

The first presentation examines moral distress as a pathway linking justice climate to child welfare workers’ intent to stay. Using a bifactor ESEM-within-CFA model, the findings show that overall and organizational-level moral distress, but not team-level distress, mediate this relationship. When workers experience unfair organizational systems, moral distress increases, making them more likely to leave. This points to the need for organizations to address structural constraints and strengthen justice-oriented policies and support.

The second presentation advances the job demands–resources model by examining the impacts of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on burnout and organizational commitment. A dominance analysis showed that procedural justice was most beneficial for strengthening organizational commitment, whereas interactional justice was a stronger factor for lower burnout. These findings suggest that organizational justice is an essential element of job resources for enhancing workforce well-being by promoting fairness in organizational structures and interactions.

The third presentation focuses on democratic supervisory practices, demonstrating their importance for worker well-being outcomes, including organizational belonging, work–life balance, and perceived importance of self-care, even when broader organizational climate factors are less influential. Regression results showed organizational support and goal-oriented supervision predicted belonging, while supervisor support predicted work–life balance. Organizational variables did not predict work–life balance, and no variables predicted self-care importance, suggesting distinct mechanisms shaping outcomes.

The fourth presentation examined the effects of organizational bias, conceptualized as a violation of human dignity within organizational democracy, on child welfare workers’ job performance and intent to stay. Results showed that perceived stress fully mediated the effect of organizational bias on job performance and partially mediated its effect on intent to stay. Findings suggest that reducing organizational bias may decrease stress, enhance performance, and improve retention, contributing to more equitable and democratic workplaces.

Together, these four studies contribute to understanding how elements of organizational democracy operate, where they are most effective, and what happens when they are missing for the healthy and sustainable child welfare workforce. The audience will engage in discussions on developing organizational strategies that promote organizational democracy.