Bissell - Organisational Behaviour for Social Work

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

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ISBN 978 1 84742 279 8 paperback
ISBN 978 1 84742 280 4 hardcover

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Dedicated to the Richmond Road Irregulars and to temporary social work staff everywhere

Two Motivation: what makes social work a good job?

Three Communication: does the social work grapevine work for you?

Four Decision making: do your practice decisions seem to make themselves?

Five Team working: can you join the perfect social work team?

Six Organisational culture: do social services have a culture of complaint or a culture of care?

Seven Organisational learning: is a learning organisation a good place to work?

Eight Leadership and management: is a social work style of management possible?

Nine Management strategies: do the costs outweigh the gains?

Ten Power and the organisation: who really controls social services?

Eleven Organisational change: do welfare organisations resist change?

Twelve Conclusion: social workers in organisations

Successive year groups of social work students have helped shape the content of this book, typically by contributing examples from their practice placements, both within class dialogue and in their assessed essays at the end of the module. Their module evaluations helped shape the content too, resulting in a final work that captures something of the plain-speaking of the interactive lectures in which we participated over many years. Thanks are due to them all.

Also, I would probably have been sidetracked by research involvement altogether, had it not been for the never-failing interest and support provided by the publishers. Finally, I am grateful to the social work colleagues both academic and practising who commented upon and discussed ideas with me, and especially to Professor Brid Featherstone whose problem-solving approach seldom, if ever, failed, to Dr Kate Karban who read an early draft and made invaluable suggestions, and to Pat Wilkinson (my Head of Department) who moved work around to make writing the book possible. I am also indebted to Dr Paul Sullivan for assistance with Chapter Seven. Any errors in the work are of course mine alone.

Gavin Bissell

Spring 2012

Figures

2.1 Community Care reader survey 2009

2.2 Average number of jobs held per decade of employment in social services for staff in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland

2.3 Mayos research data from The human problems of an industrial civilization

4.1 Everyday decisions

5.1 Benne and Sheats subtypes of team member roles

5.2 Belbins team roles

5.3 Bales analysis of meanings

7.1 The learning organisation model

7.2 Communities of practice

8.1 Emotional intelligence for management

9.1 Model of Total Quality Management

10.1 Mintzbergs cast of players

11.1 Kotters eight-step model of organisational change

11.2 Three alternative structures of a social services department

11.3 Management structure in a geographically split social services department

11.4 Management structure in a geographically then client-based split social services department

Tables

2.1 Rate of past job turnover per decade by job type and age at first interview in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland

In a post-war introductory book on social work for new students, Timms (1970) criticised what he referred to as:

[the] familiar and misleading story of developments from the time of Christ (the first social worker) down to the present century, with brief stops in the sixteenth century and a longer pause in the nineteenth. (Timms, 1970, p 1)

The remark demonstrates the down-to-earth, reconstructionist mood of 1960s social work in Britain, but most interestingly, from the point of view of this book, the genuine account of social work that Timms proceeded to offer began with a chapter entitled Social work in organisations. In this chapter, he called for attention to the fit (or lack of fit) between the social worker, agency and client, yet the chapter did not fully realise Timms project, perhaps because it went well beyond the space available, in scope. It is therefore in furtherance of that very practical project, of mapping the social work organisation, that this book is undertaken.

Successive government bodies regulating social work training over the past two decades have specifically referred to skills in working in organisations as an area of training and assessment. More recently, job descriptions for social workers increasingly invoke a care management approach, which involves the management, direction and disposal of care resources, including support systems, and this also calls for organisational behaviour knowledge, not least because of the inter-organisational nature of such work.

There is every reason to expect that social work training will maintain its practice focus over the next few years, as the profession continues to follow American models of training imbued with the philosophy of pragmatism. The pressure for practice-linked organisational behaviour texts can therefore be expected to grow. Although there are some very good introductory organisational behaviour textbooks (for example, Handy, 1993; Vecchio, 2000; Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004), these lack attention to the specific gender and care-work aspects that are characteristic of social welfare organisations. Also, organisational behaviour textbooks have been aimed particularly at managers or students of management (indeed, there is a small but growing collection of titles aimed at managers of social services, such as Hafford-Letchfield, 2008, and Hughes and Wearing, 2007).