The Correlation between Superior’s Toxic Leadership, Social Workers’ Turnover Intention － Social Support as a Moderator

• Main Authors: Hsu, Ya-Chuan, 許雅娟
• Other Authors: Chang, Chen-Cheng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21024596055520756131

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 社會工作學系 === 101 === The relationship between work stress and its’ outcomes has been generally researched in Occupational Health Psychology, but few of them attempted to treat the leadership and organization behavior which bring the employees pain and a variety of negative emotions as a stressor. Peter J. Frost defined the toxic leadership as a new kind of stressor, and Henry Kao developed the Toxic Leadership Questionnaire which has been used in a few research on the field of business, medical and policeman, etc, in Taiwan and mainland China, but without social welfare. On the other hand, turnover of social workers has been a common problem; therefore, it’s worthy of plumbing the relationship between toxic leadership and it. This is exactly the purpose of this paper. Moreover, it was postulated that this relationship would be moderated by social support. The qualitative research method and questionnaire interview were adopted. The study purposively sampled social workers who worked with child and youths in Taipei City. There were 103 valid questionnaires. These data were analyzed by SPSS. The research findings are following: 1.Descriptive Statistics: The toxic leadership exists at the participants’ workplaces and its’ level is under average. The insensitivity is the most serious one. The level of turnover intention is above average. The most common reason is that participants think it’s easy to get a new job. The level of social support is above average. The highest support is from colleague’s affection, and the lowest is from superior’s instrument. 2.t-test & ANOVA: The participants who believe in Oriental religions and work in public section suffer higher toxic leadership and they have higher turnover intention than those who believe in Occidental religions and work in contracting-out organizations. Furthermore, the participants who work in public section have higher turnover intention. 3.Correlation: The toxic leadership correlates with turnover intention positively, but correlates with social support negatively. The correlation between Social support and turnover intention is negative. 4.Hierarchy regression: The toxic leadership has positive effect on turnover intention. The social support from colleague’s affection and superior’s instrument would effectively reduce the infidelity which affects turnover intention. Some suggestions based on the results are below: From the level of organization, they should let employees evaluate the degree of toxic leadership and its influence at work to prevent turnover intention by creating a supportive work atmosphere with colleague’s affection and superior’s instrument, implement measures to avoid toxic leadership, e.g., training leaders to increase their sensitivity to the subordinates, and cultivating talent toxic handler. From the level of employees, it’s important to strengthen workers’ self efficiency and achievement motivation, so they could deal with the toxic leadership more effectively. Moreover, the government is expected to establish a social work database for conducting more researches, developing manpower resource, and planning the social welfare system and social service delivery.