Ineffective Organizational Responses to Workers’ Secondary Traumatic Stress: A Case Study of the Effects of an Unhealthy Organizational Culture

ABSTRACT

Organizations play a vital role in preventing or ameliorating secondary traumatic stress (STS) among helping professionals. This qualitative case study investigated one organization’s response to workers’ STS, why its response was ineffective, and how its organizational structure and organizational culture negatively impacted its response to employees’ trauma-related distress. Data included 29 in-depth interviews with staff members serving survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, ethnographic fieldnotes, and the employee handbook. Key findings were that the organization’s approach was overly individualistic, that employees needed additional resources and education to engage in effective self-care, and that the organizational culture undermined workers’ well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary traumatic stress
• vicarious trauma
• organizational culture
• organizational structure
• organizational effectiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Practice Points

• Staff members’ self-care alone is not a sufficient response to STS. An individualistic approach to workers’ STS places an additional burden on staff members.

• Administrators at organizations providing services to trauma survivors should develop an effective organizational response to STS, as well as assess the strengths and weaknesses of their organizational culture.

• Organizations should provide supportive services for staff members, ensure that workloads are reasonable, prioritize staff members’ needs as highly as clients’ needs, pay a living wage, train staff members regarding STS, and proactively foster a trauma-informed organizational culture that promotes staff members’ well-being.

Notes

¹ To calculate this conservative estimate, I summed the total number of only seven groups of helping professionals (i.e., social workers, psychologists, mental health counselors, social and human service assistants, police and sheriff’s patrol officers, firefighters, and registered nurses), using data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook (2018), and multiplied the total number of helping professionals (5,322,150) by the lowest prevalence estimate (15%; see Lee et al., 2017) of STS reported among a nationally representative sample (which totaled 798,322 professionals affected by STS).

² I did not engage in participant observation while services were being provided to survivors (e.g., in the shelter, in counseling sessions, or while accompanying the crisis response teams) due to concerns that this might compromise clients’ confidentiality or add to their distress.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this study was provided by grants from the University of Michigan’s Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Department of Sociology, and Center for the Education of Women.