Background & Purpose. Employee's turnover in child welfare agencies negatively influences remaining employees, clients, and organization itself as well as losing skilled or trained employees. For example, employee's high turnover tends to be cyclical, in that high turnover gives additional workload burden to remaining employees and causes lack of continuity of services for vulnerable children and families. Moreover, child welfare agencies have to bear financial costs, including hiring and training. Although current literature increasingly emphasizes the importance of organizational factors in employee's turnover issues, more empirical research is needed to be conducted to understand organizational effects on employee's turnover. This study pays specific attention to the employee's turnover that arises, because of organizational culture and climate among organizational factors.

Method. Survey data were collected from 766 respondents of caseworkers and supervisors in public child welfare agencies from 25 counties in the State of New York. Respondents indicated their level of agreement with statement using a 5-point Likert scale at the Workforce Retention Study survey, covering various characteristics of organizational culture and climate. The outcome variable, an employee's turnover, is measured by the employee's intention to leave as the precursor of actual turnover. The independent variable, organizational culture is measured in three aspects, i.e., Achievement/Innovation/Competence (AIC), Cooperation/Supportiveness/Responsiveness (CSR), and Emphasis on Rewards (ER). And organizational climate is measured in four aspects, i.e., Role Clarity (RC), Personal Accomplishment (PA), Emotional Exhaustion (EE), and Workload (WL).

Findings. Almost 63 percent of the sample indicated an intention to leave their current jobs. Regression analyses indicated that organizational culture and climate are significant predictors of employee's turnover. Among organizational culture and climate variables, Emphasis on Rewards (ER) and Emotional Exhaustion (EE) were appeared as significant determinants of employee's intention to leave in public child welfare agencies. These findings suggest that public child welfare employees who have clearer and more effective incentives and rewards for a job well done or who have more sufficient emotional energy for the job show less intention to leave their current jobs. Implications to social work, limitations of the study, and recommendations for future studies are discussed.