Will material interest make social workers quit their job? A meta-analysis

Abstract

Summary The academia and the profession have long overlooked the importance of material interest in the profession of social work. In order to address this research gap, we first reviewed the historical role that material interest has played in differentiating professions from nonprofessions and analyzed its decreasing status along the development of professions due to the two competing discourses of professionalization and de-professionalization. We concluded with the fundamental question, “does material interest still matter for the professions under the current professional environments,” and answered this question by purposively selecting one of the most important organizational outcomes of the social work workplace—turnover intentions—as our dependent variable. We then conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the relationship between salary and turnover on 24 studies with a combined sample of 9343 social workers. Findings The results showed that salary was negatively related to social workers’ intentions to leave organizations (r = −.18, ρ = −.21). Specifically, both social workers’ actual salary and their satisfaction with pay and benefits were negatively associated with individual employees’ turnover intentions. Applications This research also supported Barth’s argument that despite social workers’ earnings are “unresponsive” to the labor market, they are not so different from other professions in the workforce market. Research implications both for the third model of the profession—institutionalist professionalism—in contemporary society and for salary raises were discussed.