Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to test the theory of police integrity, particularly its fourth dimension, on a centralized police agency and to assess the degree to which levels of police integrity are related to the characteristics of the larger environment.
Design/methodology/approach
– In 2008, a stratified representative sample of 945 Croatian police officers from ten police administrations evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing a range of various forms of police misconduct. The questionnaire measures officer views regarding scenario seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline, and willingness to report the misconduct.
Findings
– Bivariate analyses show that police officers’ evaluations of seriousness differed across categories of police administrations for more than one-half of the scenarios. Multivariate analyses reveal that, once organizational predictors are entered into the models, community characteristics remain significant predictors of seriousness evaluations for only a few scenarios.
Research limitations/implications
– The analytical strategies were limited by the number of police administrations in the country.
Practical implications
– The results indicate that levels of police integrity in large, centralized organizations vary across units and that the characteristics of the communities the police are a contributing factor to these differences. At the same time, organizational characteristics carry substantial weight.
Originality/value
– Prior studies of police integrity focussed on the organizational aspects (the first three dimensions of the theory); the present paper extends the literature to ascertain the importance of the larger environment and its characteristics for levels of police integrity (the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory).
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.
PurposeThough contemporary police organizational behavior scholars often limit their measure of organizational justice to just supervisory procedural justice, this study examines how the additional dimensions of supervisor trustworthiness and peer procedural justice compare with procedural justice in their role shaping police outcomes.Design/methodology/approachA survey of 638 police officers in Zagreb, Croatia, was used to regress three separate dimensions of organizational justice on key officer attitudes toward their duties.FindingsThe authors found that supervisor trustworthiness and peer procedural justice were the dominant predictors of officers' rule compliance and trust in the public.Originality/valueThe findings suggest that police scholars and practitioners seeking to better understand the role of officer judgments on resisting agency reform should consider the precedent in corporate behavior research to specifically test the unique roles of multiple components of police organizational behavior on policing outcomes.
The paper aims to investigate the theoretical assumption that the value system (according to the Schwartz model) is associated with compliance with recommendations to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the theoretical assumption, persons whose value system emphasizes social focus and whose values are self-transcendence and conservation will comply with measures to a greater extent. On the other hand, people whose value system is focused on personal focus and whose values self-direction and openness to change will be less compliant with measures for combating the spread of the virus. The research was conducted in three Southeastern European countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia using a survey of 1024 students. The Schwartz scale on basic human values was used as a research instrument. The research was conducted at the very beginning of the pandemic (March and April 2020). The results of the hierarchical regression showed that the values of openness to change (personal focus) and conservation (social focus) are significant predictors of compliance with measures and trust in institutions and sex.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.