External Procedural Justice: Do Just Supervisors Shape Officer Trust and Willingness to Take the Initiative With the Public?

Abstract

Decades of empirical research have shaped our understanding of organizational justice in the workplace and public assessments of police procedures on the street, but only recently has a nascent wave of research sought to better understand the role that officer perceptions of supervisory procedural justice play in shaping their (un)fair interactions with the public. The nascent research testing this relationship has focused on the evidence that officer perceptions of trust in the public is a pathway between internal procedural justice and external procedural justice. This article tests the role of trust and a parallel pathway that incorporates the concepts of work engagement and personal initiative in the procedural justice literature. Relying on a survey of 638 Croatian police officers, this study finds that the effect of supervisory procedural justice on officers’ external procedural justice is positive but indirect through a measure of trust in the public and the proposed engagement/initiative mechanism. The implications of these findings for research and police practice are discussed.

Attitudes toward peers, supervisors, and citizens: a comparison of Chinese and Taiwanese police officers

“…These results support a recent line of research that highlights the tremendous values of enhancing supervisory procedural justice in promoting positive organizational outcomes, such as officer commitment to the organization, job satisfaction, compliance with agency rules, and procedural justice on the street (Rosenbaum and McCarty, 2017;Wu et al, 2017). Particularly, the results reconfirm previous evidence that supervisory justice is instrumental in increasing officer trust in supervisors (Wang et al, 2020) and citizens (Peacock et al, 2021), and bring new evidence that supervisory justice benefits officers' peer relationship as well. When supervisors are open to officers' opinions and input and treat officers with respect and openness, officers also report more caring, helpful, and supportive colleagues.…”

The Distinct Role of Peers and Supervisors in Shaping Officers’ Just and Unjust Interactions with Citizens

“…Past organizational justice research suggests that agencies benefit from adopting participative and transactional leadership styles associated with fair policing (Peacock et al, 2021; Wolfe & Piquero, 2011; Wu et al, 2017). As a result, this study supports past findings and expands the existing policy prescription by suggesting that police reform should not only target the selection and training of just supervisors but also focus on the development of healthier peer interactions.…”

Contrasting the role of trustworthy versus fair supervisors in organizational justice models of policing outcomes

“…The policing literature over the last decade has found that supervisor procedural justice is a strong antecedent in models of police outcomes. Most of these studies have found that fair supervision is directly related to intermediary variables that predict policing outcomes (Kutnjak Ivkovi c et al, 2020;Peacock et al, 2021;Sun et al, 2018Sun et al, , 2021. This includes studies associating procedural justice with a measure of supervisor trustworthiness that predicted policing outcomes (e.g.…”

“…The antecedent variable of trust in supervisors differs from the construct of trust in the organization, which has consistently demonstrated the role of an intermediary variable in the relationship between measures of organizational justice and police outcome variables (Colquitt et al, 2001). Tests of trust in supervisors have not found the measure to be a consistent intermediary variable between supervisory justice and work outcomes (Aryee et al, 2002;Haas et al, 2015;Peacock et al, 2021;Tan and Tan, 2000). For example, Haas et al (2015) had to combine trust in supervisors with their antecedent measure of organizational justice that predicted self-reported officer compliance with the rules.…”