Is Social Management a Profession? Managerial Styles Within Italian Welfare Organizations

How Unstandardized Work Tasks Create Arenas for Leadership

“…Gunnarsdóttir (2016) found that emotional management was an essential leadership function in times of change among managers in child welfare services, and Belgian social workers found empowered management behaviors to be supportive (Raeymaeckers & Dierckx, 2013). Castro (2017) identified four types of managers-formal, professional, entrepreneurial, and informal-in Italian social work who lead interpersonally to varying degrees. Others have found leadership in social work to be about performing important intermediary functions, such as supporting employees emotionally and through supervision (Hafford-Letchfield, Lambley, Spolander, & Cocker, 2014).…”

“…This research identifies employees' and managers' perceptions and experiences of leadership characteristics and behaviors, and thus falls within the tradition of implicit leadership theory (Offermann & Coats, 2017). The study presents a conceptual framework of implicit leadership in public human services, an important contribution because of an identified lack of research concerning how leadership improves human service organizations (Castro, 2017;Peters, 2017;Sullivan, 2016). The study includes frontline managers and their employees.…”