Psychological Empowerment and Child Welfare Worker Outcomes: A Path Analysis

The purpose of this study was to investigate how work environment and psychological empowerment related to worker outcomes in public child welfare. These relationships were examined by testing a conceptual model in which psychological empowerment mediated the relationships between work environment variables (quality of supervision and role ambiguity) and worker outcome variables (emotional exhaustion and intentions to remain employed in child welfare). Responses from 234 public child welfare front-line workers in a southeastern state were used to test the proposed mediating model. The results of the study revealed that quality of supervision and psychological empowerment were directly related to workers\u27 intentions to remain employed in child welfare. An indirect relationship between quality of supervision and intentions to remain through the mediating variable of psychological empowerment was found. Quality of supervision was also indirectly related to worker emotional exhaustion through the mediating variable of psychological empowerment. While the work environment variable role ambiguity was not directly related to the outcomes emotional exhaustion or intentions to remain, indirect relationships through the mediating variable of psychological empowerment were found