Supporting the Support Services Providers: Exploring the Invisible Aspects of Work Extremity of Social Workers
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Chan, Xi Wen
Murray, Lachlan
Houlihan, Thomas
Gai, Sheetal
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Abstract
This inductive research reveals an invisible form of mundane extremity caused by the organisational system and inefficient HRM practices. Based on 30 interviews with social workers across Australia, we employed an interpretivist approach to coding and analysing the data thematically. We identified four paradoxical tensions existing in the domains of occupation, organisation, interpersonal, and work roles that hinder social workers’ capabilities to help clients. These tensions generate perceptions of a lack of support, a lack of resources, and role expectation violation, as well as negative feelings of supportlessness, helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness, subsequently resulting in physical, psychological, and emotional exhaustion for social workers. Since the inefficiency-driven demands occur in the work processes and not the work itself, they are often not accounted for in the official workload and contribute to mundane work extremity in an invisible manner. Our research enriches the understanding of work extremity, introduces a work extremity lens to understand social work, and connects work extremity research to HRM practices.
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The International Journal of Human Resource Management
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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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Human resources management
Organisational behaviour
Social work
Human resources and industrial relations
Strategy, management and organisational behaviour
Applied and developmental psychology
Social Sciences
Management
Business & Economics
Social workers
work extremity
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Fan, S; Chan, XW; Murray, L; Houlihan, T; Gai, S, Supporting the Support Services Providers: Exploring the Invisible Aspects of Work Extremity of Social Workers, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2023