Enhancing Caseworker Job Satisfaction Through Empowerment: An Innovative Tool for Employee Retention

Child welfare caseworkers typically have high turnover rates, and little is known about how to increase their job satisfaction. Utilizing structural equation modeling, this study investigates the connections between empowerment, leadership, learning culture, physical environment, and job satisfaction among social workers in child welfare organizations. We employ a dataset from a comprehensive organizational health assessment survey of 2801 individuals to analyze the direct and indirect effects of empowerment variables on job satisfaction, as well as the influence of leadership, learning culture, and the caseworkers' physical environment. The findings highlight the potential for empowerment as a tool for strengthening culture and increasing job satisfaction. Specifically, trust and self-determination had the strongest relationship with the empowerment construct in this study.