The Role of Organizational Leaders in Employee Self-Care: A Change Management Approach

Although literature demonstrates that helping professionals have had high levels of stress and burnout for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the issue. The already burdened healthcare workers, now facing increased workloads, long hours, and high-level exposure to trauma, have created an urgency to address this significant risk to helping professionals. The current capstone will bring awareness to organizational leaders regarding the importance of employee self-care and the benefits of implementing employee self-care programs. First, a systematic literature review will examine self-care in helping professions and explore how organizational leaders operationalize employee self-care programs. In addition, the capstone aims to impress upon organization leaders the onus of operationalizing employee self-care programs through the conceptual framework of chaos theory, person-centered theory, servant and transformational leadership theories, and the NASW Code of Ethics. Keywords: Self-care, ADKAR, Change Management, Leadership, Social Wor