Exit, silence and loyalty in the Swedish social services – the importance of openness

Abstract

The advent of New Public Management in Sweden has affected thesocial services in terms of increased workload, more conflicting demandsand a reduction in professional autonomy. This study contributes to theunderstanding of how various job demands, job resources and theorganisational factor of openness influence the exit, silence and loyaltystrategies amongst social workers and managers in the Swedish socialservices. Regression analyses of national web questionnaire data gatheredfrom 4,068 social workers and 432 managers have revealed that: (1)role conflicts associated positively with exit and negatively with loyalty,(2) job autonomy was negatively related to silence and positively relatedto loyalty in both groups, (3) openness had a high explanatory value inall of the outcome variables for both groups and (4) openness was apotential mediator between role conflicts and all of the dependentvariables. A conclusion is that if organisations want social workers andmanagers to stop considering exit, want to counteract silence and wantto improve loyalty, management strategies need to be developed thatreduce the conflicting demands and create organisational structures thatfacilitate a continuous and open dialogue between the strategic andoperational levels of the organisation.