All public institutions dependent on state supports were required to be responsible in job performance for the general public who supply the resources, and social workers are not exempt from it. Thus the study on the job performance of social workers ...
All public institutions dependent on state supports were required to be responsible in job performance for the general public who supply the resources, and social workers are not exempt from it. Thus the study on the job performance of social workers in a social welfare center can be a method to measure such a responsibility. Furthermore, the study of the job performance could facilitate establishing identity of the social workers as professionals, and enhance achieving the objectives of the social welfare centers by reviewing the job performance of the actual social workers whose status as professionals were relatively low(Lee In-jae, 1993).
The purpose of this study is to examine the influence factors on the job performance of the social workers in social welfare centers, and to investigate the causal relations of perception on distribution justice, procedural justice and interactional justice, job satisfaction, organizational commitment that were found as relative factors in previous studies with job performance. Based on this, a plan was designed to enhance the job performance of the social workers and a structural model of major variables affecting the job performance was devised to use it as a base for efficient operation and management of organization. After inspecting direct and indirect influences of the factors about the job performance, a practical plan for social welfare was considered to enhance the job performance.
These research were executed as the subject of 172 social workers who were engaged in the social welfare center actually more than three year among the social workers of the 48 social welfare center in Busan. 172 questionnaires were distributed and 142 questionnaires were withdrawn by mail/visit, from October 15 to 29, 2004. 137 among withdrawn 142 questionnaires were used for analysis.
The collected data were executed the frequency analysis, discriptive analysis, reliability analysis, factor analysis, Pearson's correlation, structural equation modeling.
The major results of this study were as follows.
First, an average job performance of the social workers was 3.66 which was relatively high. Regarding sub-categories, demand for the job and management of the job volume were the highest as 3.82, and collecting community resources and their application were the lowest as 3.42. However, the job performance was shown generally high in all categories.
Second, perception on the distribution justice for the social workers was lower than average as 2.86, and the procedural justice was far lower than the distribution justice and interactional justice as 3.22. The interactional justice was higher than the other justices as 3.22.
Third, average job satisfaction of the social workers was 3.30 and it indicated high job satisfaction of the subjects of this study in general. Internal satisfaction was higher than the average as 3.94 and external satisfaction was lower than the average as 2.66.
Fourth, the organizational commitment was just average of 2.95. Regarding the sub-categories, affective commitment was the highest as 3.60 and continuance commitment was the lowest as 2.50. Normative commitment was lower than the average as 2.75.
Last, direct influence factors of the job performance were the perception of the interactional justice and organizational commitment. Indirect influence occurred when the perception of the procedural justice and interactional justice was obtained through the organizational commitment.
Implications of the results of this study were as follows.
First, since the most influential factor on the job performance was the organizational commitment, it was necessary to enhance the organizational commitment as an efficient tool to increase the job performance, which was considered as an organizational objective, and manage members of the organization more effectively.
Second, this study indicated that the perception on the interactional justice directly influenced the job performance. It suggested that the authority should respect the opinions of the members, show polite and favorable attitudes towards them in order to encourage participation into the managerial processes, and provide accurate and complete information on the managerial processes.
Third, this study showed empirically that the distribution justice, procedural justice and interactional justice were differentiated with one another in their definitions. Although the interactional justice was tend to be estimated as a component of the procedural justice, recent studies indicated that it had the unique feature that was different from the procedural justice. Since the result of this study manifested that the interactional justice was the most influential factor to predict result factors, more attention on the interactional justice is needed in the future research.