External providers of social care in the UK are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable in society and the ongoing commitment of their staff is essential to achieving quality service outcomes. Yet, in an era of austerity and deteriorating employment conditions, ensuring commitment is increasingly challenging for outsourced social care employers. Line managers remain important to worker identity and willingness to work in social care (Baines et al., 2014) and hence are crucial to managing their front-line care workers’ commitment. However, how far they have the capabilities to create workplaces that encourage and sustain commitment among their employees remains unknown. Against the background of public service austerity, this study therefore seeks to examine the subjective experiences and structural context of line managing in social care, and their implications for the management of staff commitment.
Social care workplaces often embody climates of work intensification and stress that undermine the line manager role (Hutchinson and Purcell, 2010) with the outsourcing of care work being operationalized through a multiplicity of New Public Management-style contracts from public sector funding authorities. At the same time, sustaining employee commitment in the voluntary sector is a complex and puzzling phenomenon. In addition to accepting lower wages than in for-profit organisations (Leete, 2000), employees also tolerate increasing levels of stress (Nickson et al., 2008), verbal abuse, violence, and physical and emotional ill-health (Baines, 2006). In particular, the largely female social care workforce is seen as possessing natural capacities to provide endless care despite fiscal uncertainty, short staffing and low wages (Baines & Cunningham, 2011). Expectations of high commitment among female staff are also informed by misconceptions of this capacity to care, reinforcing the gendered ethos of altruism and long hours of paid and unpaid work, as well as devaluing women’s skills (Baines et al., 2014). Beyond altruism, however, voluntary sector workers possess instrumental orientations, limiting their tolerance of low terms and conditions (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009). Commitment in the sector thus has a self-perpetuating element, but also needs to be maintained.
In order to shed light on both the role and capacity of line managers to manage and sustain this commitment, this study recognizes the advantages of an inductive approach for gaining insight into the subjective experience of line managers. As part of a larger multiple case study, we present initial findings from a UK social care organisation, drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior and line managers, HR functions, employees and their representatives. These findings highlight how changes in the operational context (e.g. austerity, leanness and precarity) and in contracts from various public sector funding authorities shape the workplace climate. They further reveal the implications that these changes and pressures on working conditions have for the line managerial role in care work. Furthermore, the study offers insight into the organisational support and qualifications that line managers draw on to fulfil their tasks, pointing to how social relations in the workplace and aspects of the labour process in care work shape line managers’ ability to lead.
References
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