| As the state attaches importance to and promotes social work,the social work profession is being vigorously developed throughout the country,with many preferential policies in terms of economy and education,as well as financial and policy support in terms of institution building.So,against this background,social work has continued to grow and develop in China.However,professional social workers have encountered great problems in the process of intervention services because social work has always been regarded as a profession with great work pressure.The main job function of social workers is to intervene in the process of working with clients,pouring love into them,solving their problems and helping them to help themselves,so they also need to put in more emotional labour in the process of work.The low retention rate in the social work profession is not conducive to the development of a professional social work work workforce.Researchers have explored professional identity,organisational motivation and burnout in order to find the causes of social work brain drain.It was found that the factors affecting social workers’ willingness to stay in the profession can be divided into individual and organisational factors.Individual factors mainly refer to factors such as education level,gender and marital status,while organisational factors mainly refer to factors such as salary,organisational climate and organisational welfare.In addition,although more and more research has focused on the retention intentions of specific types of employees,there is still very limited research on employee retention from a generational perspective.Current research has found that the characteristics of the new generation of employees are characterised by problems such as resignation,instability and low loyalty,which pose a huge challenge to the development of the social work work workforce and the social work profession in China.At present,the new generation of post-90 s employees is increasingly becoming the main force in the workplace.Compared to their older counterparts,this group has grown up in a different environment and formed their unique employee values,which in turn affects their perceptions and behaviours at work,and therefore it can be hypothesized that there may be differences in the formation mechanism of retention intentions between the new generation and their older counterparts.This study examines the interaction between perceptions of organisational support and retention intentions of Chinese new generation social workers from the perspectives of resource conservation theory and organisational support theory,and examines the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion.This study uses data from 2235 samples of the China Social Work Statistics(CSWLS2019)for empirical analysis.The main variables were perceptions of organisational support,emotional exhaustion and intention to stay in the job.The results of the study show that the feeling of organisational support has a significant positive effect on the intention to stay in the job,and that emotional exhaustion partially mediates the effect between organisational support and the intention to stay in the job.This study clarifies the mediating mechanism of emotional exhaustion acting on the intention to stay through the sense of organizational support by means of resource conservation theory and organizational support theory.Meanwhile,the findings of the study are useful for retaining new generation of social work professionals,improving the service quality of social workers in China,enhancing the social identity of social workers and providing reference for promoting the development of the social work profession in China. |
