For the last few decades, the role of managers in social work has increased in unprecedented ways. It has been argued that they are now at the helm of social work and influence the quality of social work delivery. In doing so, their leadership styles as well as their ideology (i.e. perception on the use of discretion) seems to play a pivotal role. To date, we can gain insight into their
leaderships styles by building on research from adjacent fields such as organisational psychology.
However, we have no insight into the ideology of social work managers, the strategies they use to translate this ideology into practice and the meaning of this ideology for the delivery of social services and the quality of social work. With this research proposal, we aim to capture these gaps in our current knowledge by using a mixed-methods approach.