The Direct Effects of Field of Practice on Core Managerial Role Competencies: A Study Across Three Types of Public Sector Human Service Agencies

ABSTRACT

The direct effects of field of practice on managerial action has received minimal empirical attention within the social work management literature. The present study addressed the issue by surveying 81 public managers responsible for three types of county-based human service agencies across the state of New York. Consistent with Yukl's (2004) flexible leadership theory, child welfare managers reported engaging in the criterion measure, human relations activity, significantly more than senior service managers. Unexpectedly, a significant difference also was found between employment and senior service managers; however, none was noted for child welfare and employment service managers. The findings are discussed, along with implications for social work management practice and research.

KEYWORDS:

• Field of practice
• managerial role competencies
• human service management
• social work management
• flexible leadership theory
• competing values framework

Notes

1. New York City's five boroughs were not included due to their extremely atypical populations, making the total pool of public sector human service managers 171.

2. To avoid a positively skewed distribution, the size of one office was truncated to 125.

3. To ensure sufficient degrees of freedom (i.e., a 1 to 20 ratio between independent variables and cases) only one control variable was incorporated into the regression analysis.

4. To minimize biases associated with a single imputation method, a composite estimate was derived using mean substitution and regression imputation.

5. Skewness and kurtosis (normality), studentized residuals, center leverage values, Cook's distance statistic (outliers and nonoutlying influentials), and scatterplots (heteroskedasticity).

6. Two research studies were located from a search of the Social Work Abstract, Social Science Abstract, and EBSCO Academic Search Premier library databases.

7. The author reviewed course offerings from the 30 highest ranked schools of social work in U.S. News & Worlds Reports (2005).