Caring for the Caregivers: Patterns of Organizational Caregiving

The study offers a system-level perspective on job burnout among human service workers by focusing on their internal networks of caregiving relationships. A qualitative case study of a social service agency reveals how primary caregivers may be filled with or emptied of emotional resources necessary for caregiving in interactions with other agency members. Working from eight key behavioral dimensions of caregiving derived from the study, I define and illustrate five recurring patterns of caregiving that characterized agency members' relationships. By placing the patterns in relation to one another, I then reveal the system of caregiving, showing how it moved or failed to move throughout the agency as a whole. This system of caregiving is discussed in terms of its multiple determinants and its implications for members' abilities to perform the agency's primary task of giving care to clients.