Cultivating Community-Focused Norms in Law Enforcement: Servant Leadership, Accountability Systems, and Officer Attitudes.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Salient incidents of officer misconduct, violence, and disrespect toward citizens threaten public safety and weaken the legitimacy of the police. With an eye toward improving police-community relations, law enforcement organizations employ multiple strategies to alter the approaches of line-level officers. Law enforcement organizations implement recruitment and retention strategies to better represent the demographics of communities they serve, body-worn cameras to improve accountability in police-civilian interactions, and early-intervention systems designed to identify problematic officers. Alternatively, some organizations implement community-focused reform efforts that shift the approach of police from an “us vs them” mentality to a co-productive, community-centered approach, which has been shown to improve citizen satisfaction with police. Despite efforts to improve police-community relations, law enforcement organizations have been unable to overcome decades of unequal service provision and repeated instances of officer misconduct. Some of these failures may be a product of the informal systems within policing that are charged with carrying out reform, highlighting a need to better understand how informal systems within policing inform the attitudes and approaches of line-level officers. Efforts to understand these effects exist in a limited but growing body of research investigating intra-organizational dynamics and the motivations or attitudes of line-level officers. This study builds on this work by examining the influence of servant leadership practices and work-unit climate on officer support for procedurally fair policing practices, officer willingness to report peer misconduct, and officer community citizenship behavior. There is evidence that leaders play a role in informing the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats (e.g., Wright and Pandey 2010; Keulemans and Groeneveld 2020); however, there are fewer examples of research investigating the influence of servant leadership in the public sector (e.g., Shim, Park, Kuem, and Kim 2020), and still fewer examining the effects of servant leadership on attitudes in law enforcement. Furthermore, while law enforcement organizations rely on accountability systems to improve performance, relatively little research has explored the effects of accountability climates on the climate within the organization or the attitudes and approaches of line-level officers.This dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature by addressing four key questions: (1) Are higher levels of servant leadership associated with line-level officer attitudes about community-focused approaches to policing? (2) What are the pathways through which servant leaders influence line-level officer attitudes about community-focused approaches to policing? (3) Do work-unit climates that consist of high pressure for officer activity weaken the effectiveness of servant leadership? And (4) Do work-unit climates that consist of high levels of internal political behavior weaken the effectiveness of servant leadership? To address the key questions in this dissertation, I collected original survey data from a large law enforcement organization. I analyze survey responses from enforcement personnel (response rate: 61%) across two surveys administered at two different time points. I anticipate that servant leadership behaviors from post commanders will be associated with higher perceptions of prosocial impact and work-unit identification, and that these psychological mechanisms will be associated with officer attitudes that prioritize the community. In addition, I anticipate that unit climates that remove officers from their impact on the community – in the forms of accountability pressure or political behavior within units – moderate the effect that effective servant leadership has on officer attitudes, rendering servant leaders less effective when facing these climates. Results of multilevel regression analysis suggest that servant leadership is significantly associated with higher prosocial impact and unit identification, and that these key psychological constructs are positively associated with support for community-focused approaches to policing. Additionally, the results of parallel mediation analysis and multilevel mediation analysis suggest that prosocial impact and unit identification mediate the relationship between servant leadership and key outcomes. The direct relationship between servant leadership and attitudinal outcomes is non-significant; however, servant leadership influences outcomes indirectly through influencing psychological constructs. Finally, the effects of servant leadership on outcomes are robust across different unit climates. Specifically, the results of moderated mediation analysis suggest that unit climates wherein officers perceive accountability pressure or political behavior in their units do not disrupt the effect that servant leaders have on officer attitudes through key mediators. However, the results show significant direct effects of pressure and political behavior on key mechanisms, echoing findings that unit climate has a strong influence on individual-level approaches of line-level officers. These findings make noteworthy contributions to public administration research and practice. This is one of the first studies to examine the effects of servant leadership in a law enforcement context, and the results inform our understanding of the attitudes and approaches of street-level bureaucrats, as well as efforts to repair police-community relations. In addition, these results inform our understanding of potential negative effects of climate stemming from performance management and accountability systems in law enforcement organizations, highlighting the importance of identifying alternative mechanisms that may motivate officers to prioritize the community.