Officer Attitudes and Management Influences on Police Work Productivity

Abstract

Police officers are afforded a high degree of discretion in the exercise of their authority, and the control of this discretion is an important issue. While it is assumed that individual officer attitudes and preferences shape their discretionary activity, these officers are also members of a paramilitary organization with leaders appointed over them. The present study explored the influence of both officer attitudes and supervisor influences to explain variation in officer traffic citation issuing rates. Hierarchical linear modeling was used with a sample of 312 patrol officers and 60 supervisors from 21 municipal police agencies. The results revealed that both officer occupational attitudes and supervisor influences (through informal rewards and behavior modeling) significantly influenced the degree to which officers issued traffic citations. The findings emphasize the need for both the supervision of officers and the shaping of officer attitudes in the control of officer discretion.

Police Enforcement of Domestic Violence Laws: Supervisory Control or Officer Prerogatives?

“…While some studies found officer attitudes to be significant predictors of officer work behaviors (Brehm & Gates, 1993Johnson, 2011), others found no significant relationship between officer attitudes and work behaviors (Engel & Worden, 2003;Paoline et al, 2000;Worden, 1989). Perhaps, as the social psychological literature would suggest, these inconsistent findings were the result of differences in work environments across these studies.…”

“…The remaining agency-level variables, such as the volume of calls for service and the average span of control within the organization, had little bearing on the proportion of domestic violence calls that resulted in an arrest, explaining only 1.6% of the variance. 2 Finally, since both Engel and Worden (2003) and Johnson (2011) found that the actual enforcement attitudes of the supervisors were unassociated with the attitudes the officers' perceived they held, we decided to examine the same. For this analysis, we used only the officer-level data and, for each case, added as a variable the officer's supervisor's response to the statement, "I believe that domestic violence enforcement is a personal priority for me."…”

“…Johnson's (2011) study suggested that both officer attitudes and the work environment may influence officer discretionary behavior, at least when concerning traffic enforcement. In summary, there is evidence to suggest that an individual's attitudes are often poor predictors of that individual's behavior if the individual's attitudes are not in harmony with the norms and structure of the individual's environment.…”

“…Using survey data from a sample of officers and first-line supervisors from multiple departments, Johnson (2011) found that both officer preferences and the work environment of officers predicted how many traffic citations each officer issued. Officers who held personal beliefs that traffic enforcement was important issued high numbers of citations in comparison with their peers.…”

“…The present study extended the existing literature on this dichotomy beyond the work of Engel and Worden (2003) and Johnson (2011), by exploring a new dependent variable-domestic violence arrest rates. In doing so, the present study added to the literature on justice system responses to domestic violence, and how actors within the system can be directed to apply sanctions to batterers.…”