Supporting the support services providers: exploring the invisible aspects of work extremity of social workers

Abstract

This inductive research reveals an invisible form of mundane extremity caused by the organisational system and inefficient HRM practices. Based on 30 interviews with social workers across Australia, we employed an interpretivist approach to coding and analysing the data thematically. We identified four paradoxical tensions existing in the domains of occupation, organisation, interpersonal, and work roles that hinder social workers’ capabilities to help clients. These tensions generate perceptions of a lack of support, a lack of resources, and role expectation violation, as well as negative feelings of supportlessness, helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness, subsequently resulting in physical, psychological, and emotional exhaustion for social workers. Since the inefficiency-driven demands occur in the work processes and not the work itself, they are often not accounted for in the official workload and contribute to mundane work extremity in an invisible manner. Our research enriches the understanding of work extremity, introduces a work extremity lens to understand social work, and connects work extremity research to HRM practices.