Journal of Social Work Practice
Psychotherapeutic Approaches in Health, Welfare and the Community
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjsw20
The role of teams in social worker wellbeing and
retention
Laura Louise Cook & Pia Tham
To cite this article: Laura Louise Cook & Pia Tham (2025) The role of teams in social
worker wellbeing and retention, Journal of Social Work Practice, 39:1, 1-3, DOI:
10.1080/02650533.2025.2454791
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2025.2454791
Published online: 05 Feb 2025.
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JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE
2025, VOL. 39, NO. 1, 1–3
https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2025.2454791
EDITORIAL
The role of teams in social worker wellbeing and retention
We are delighted introduce the second special issue on social work teams. The first
special issue focused on how teams contribute to assessment and sense-making in social
work. This special issue focuses on the role of teams in social worker wellbeing and
retention.
Supportive relationships with peers and team colleagues help sustain social workers in
their role (Guzman et al., 2020; Ravalier et al., 2021; Sedivy et al., 2020). Where they function
well, teams can provide emotional containment and a secure base for workers, acting as
a buffer to the stresses of their role (Biggart et al., 2017; Ruch, 2007). Support from team
colleagues and a good relationship with line managers are all associated with retention
(Ferguson et al., 2020; McLaughlin et al., 2023; Russ et al., 2020). This special issue extends
our knowledge of the relationship between teams, social worker wellbeing and retention.
Each of the seven articles provides a window onto the emotional life of social work teams,
including how team support is enacted across an increasingly complex landscape of in-person
and online spaces. The contributions include ethnographies of teamwork and peer support,
development of measures for assessing team functioning in social work, interventions to
support teams, and reflections on the legacy of COVID-19 for teamwork and support.
The first article, by Helen Scholar and colleagues, explores the role of teams in social
worker retention. It draws upon qualitative data from a major Department for Education
(DfE) funded longitudinal study of child and family social workers in England, carried out
between 2018 and 2022. The paper reports the inductive discovery of team support as a key
factor in retention. Findings include perspectives on team composition; ways of working;
leadership, and the relationship between team experiences and worker satisfaction. The paper
concludes with recommendations for future research on social work teams.
Article two, by Florin Lazar and colleagues, explores findings from a major national
survey of the Romanian social work workforce. The findings highlight the role of teams –
particularly level of trust in colleagues – plays a vital, yet often unrecognised role in job
satisfaction among social workers. The authors identify important implications for the
organisation of social work services. They caution that a narrow focus on increasing skills
and individual wellbeing is not sufficient for creating quality social services. Instead, they
suggest that organisational and management support for teams should be regarded as
a priority rather than an optional addition.
Article three, by Pia Tham and Mikael Westling Söderström provides fresh insight
into how social work teams can be strengthened and supported. It describes a two-year
implementation study with social work teams, consisting of three interventions: teamstrengthening activities, leadership training and weekly small team supervision for social
workers new to the profession. These interventions had a significant positive impact on
the teams. Significantly, turnover, which had been high for many years, had almost
entirely ceased and team vacancies were filled. The article contains a detailed account of
© 2025 GAPS
2
EDITORIAL
the intervention and training provided to the team which will be of interest to organisa­
tions aiming to reduce turnover and improve workforce support.
Article four, by Sara Carder, describes findings from a study of two child and family social
work teams in England. This hybrid ethnography captured team interactions in the office and
online. The research identifies the team as a key source of support and space for the
performance of emotional labour in social work. However, while the team was a source of
support, it is also a source of emotional labour, where social workers needed to perform
emotion in a way that was compatible with their professional role and the ‘feeling rules’
within the team. A dramaturgical metaphor is used to conceptualise the performance of
emotion in social work teams – identifying front stage, back stage and off stage regions for the
processing and performance of emotion. This novel conceptualisation of teams includes
important recommendations for sustaining social workers and teams at an individual,
organisational and macro level.
Article five, by Viktoria Behrova and Laura Biggart, describes the development of
a new measure for assessing the team as a secure base (TASB) in social work. The TASB
model is rooted in attachment theory, and suggests that providing a secure base for social
workers fosters trust, giving them the confidence to competently carry out their work and
support service users effectively. Developed from in depth interviews with social workers,
the TASB model suggests when the team are available, and respond reliably and sensi­
tively to social workers’ needs, this creates reassuring internal mental representations that
the team can be relied upon for support when required. The team environment can
therefore promote resilience to stressful situations. Using the Delphi method, the authors
present the first essential step in the development of a quantitative measure to assess the
presence of TASB in social work teams. The development of a TASB measure is
important leap forward in terms of assessing team functioning in social work.
Article six, by Linda Mossberg, provides a detailed picture of collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. The article draws on observation of 20 team meetings focused on
problematic school attendance. Attendees included social workers, special education teachers,
school psychologists and child psychologists from specialised mental health care and first-line
mental health care. In these sessions, professionals needed to decide how to make sense of
poor attendance and find a way to address the issue. The author draws on accountability
theory (Bardach & Lesser, 1996; Romzek et al., 2014) to explore how decisions were made in
these meetings. The findings highlighted that through a process of taking, placing, and
refusing accountability, professionals determined what the work should entail and how it
should be carried out. This article therefore offers a new way of conceptualising the complex
dynamics of multi-professional teams and the construction of roles in team talk.
The final article, by Liz Frost, examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social
work teams. The article draws on findings from research undertaken with child and family
social workers between 2018 and 2023 in England, consisting of surveys (n = 2240) and
interviews (n = 140) with social workers. Three of the survey rounds were undertaken
between Summer 2020 to Summer 2022, providing unique insight into the experiences of
social workers during the pandemic. The author draws on Honneth’s (1997) recognition to
conceptualise how the loss of access to team colleagues during Covid affected workers’ sense
of wellbeing. The article raises important questions about the legacy of COVID-19 for social
work teams, particularly the implication of hot desking and other agile working practices for
achieving deep and caring relationships necessary for managing the demands of practice.
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE
3
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Laura Louise Cook
Centre for Research on Children and Families, School of Social Work, University of
East Anglia, Norwich, UK
l.cook@uea.ac.uk
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9882-2365
Pia Tham
Social Work, University of Gävle, Sweden
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4155-810X