Intention to Leave and Organizational Commitment among Child Welfare Workers

Little is known about the factors that contribute to organizational commitment among child welfare workers. Yet, since the early 1960s, child welfare has been plagued with high staff turnover rates that threaten the quality and continuity of services provided to vulnerable families. Child welfare organizations must be innovative and use proven models to assist in detecting when a worker has the intention of leaving the organization. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between intention to leave and organizational commitment among child welfare workers. Data were collected on 70 child welfare workers in North Carolina. The Three-Component Model of Employee Commitment was used to identify the types of commitment employees hold to their organization and predict employees' intention to leave their organization. The results suggested that only affective commitment independently predicted intentions to leave. Thus, all three components of this model may not be a good fit within the child welfare area to predict intention to leave. However, further research using this model with a larger child welfare sample is needed to see if these results continue to hold consistent.