The relevance of transformational leadership for promoting professional social work competence with EBPA

Abstract

Health care social workers' attitudes towards evidence-based practice (EBP) are an indispensable precursor of implementing EBP. Using a subset including 405 health care social workers from the first nationally representative survey of social workers in China, this study empirically assesses how transformational leadership (TFL) promotes health care social workers' attitudes towards EBP. The results show that organisational learning capacity (OLC) and professional competence (PC) fully mediate the positive relationship between TFL and EBP attitudes. Furthermore, TFL, OLC and PC explain 56% of the variance in health care social workers' attitudes towards EBP. This result supports the perspective that both organisational factors and individual factors may facilitate social workers' positive attitudes towards EBP, but organisational factors are more important. Therefore, to adopt, use and sustain EBP in health care social work, learning and innovation in the organisation should be increased. Furthermore, it is important to help social workers improve their PC.

Keywords: China; evidence-based practice; evidence-based practice attitude; health care social worker; organisational learning capability; professional competence; transformational leadership.