Employment mobility or turnover? An analysis of child welfare and protection employee retention

This article challenges the commonly held assumption that there is a high level of occupational turnover of social workers in all child protection and welfare agencies. By analysing occupational mobility patterns (turnover, retention and attrition) in five child protection social work teams, the article demonstrates how occupational mobility is a complex phenomenon and needs to be understood within wider shifts in employment patterns and the gendering of professions. In this paper we argue that it is important to distinguish between employee turnover and employee mobility, and that an examination of the posts taken up after leaving, at least in Ireland, may provide a different perspective on the narrative of high turnover of workers in this sector. Within the five teams, it is estimated that there was a turnover rate of 8 percent in 2006 and 11 percent in 2010, with 72 percent of child protection workers in post at the end of 2005 being retained and still in post at the end of 2010. While this should not lead to complacency, or a failure to recognise and respond to the stressful nature of child protection, it does raise questions for employers about how they might plan for occupational mobility within a stable workforce made up of largely women, aged between 25 and 35, frequently newly-qualified, who are often the main carers for children and adults outside the workplace.     

Middle Managers Moulding International Strategy: An Irish Start-up in Jamaican Telecoms

This is a story of how a group of middle managers moved beyond just implementing their firm’s tightly prescribed strategy for developing an international venture to the point where it could be argued that they failed to accomplish the four clear strategic objectives set by the firm’s executive management. Instead, the authors suggest, their success was in collectively orchestrating an emergent strategy¹ which provided the executive with a better, more profitable and durable embodiment of their strategic vision.Operating between the parent firm’s original strategic intent and the political and economic realities of the host country environment, their strategic influence is worthy of close examination. They can be divided into two distinctive groups—parent country nationals and host-country nationals—and the extent to which they co-operate with or obstruct each other will have a significant effect on the success of the enterprise.² The middle management in this case example, an Irish company launching a mobile telecommunications network in Jamaica, is drawn from both groups. This article investigates the apparent autonomy from executive control afforded these particular middle managers to identify the contingent factors that appear to allow, or constrain, their positive transmutation of the original strategic objectives. The key questions addressed are first, how the two groups, both individually and collectively, played out their roles in shifting strategy, and second, once these contextual dynamics have been identified, how other executive management groups can learn from this Irish/Jamaican experience considering similar international ventures. The authors’ response highlights those elements of strategy design, organisational structure and human resource management that they believe are critical in maximising the strategic contribution of middle managers to international ventures, and hence providing a better chance of success.     

Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees

This paper draws on comparisons between organisations and organisms to illustrate how peripheral vision can influence behaviour. Like biological organisms, organisations have sensors to inform them of threats and opportunities. The process by which these sensors are developed is ‘selection, adaptation and learning’, or SAL. While SAL’s influence is helpful, it is not always on the side of the organisation. However there are systems that can help an organisation detect oncoming challenges. These include: leveraging the peripheral vision of the CEO; improving general purpose sensors; a better reading of specialised sensors; and installing new specialised or routine sensors in areas where none presently exists.