Assessing the impact of public safety leader development in Australasia

ABSTRACT

Public safety organisations across the world invest a great deal of time and money in developing their leaders. It is perhaps surprising, then, that there is relatively little literature assessing the impact that such development opportunities have. This paper serves to address this gap by examining one such leader development programme in Australia. Seventy participants were followed for one year, and statistically significant shifts in self-reported leadership behaviour were identified. Interviews with an additional 30 former students suggested that such behavioural changes were preserved over the longer term, and may compound as individuals utilise both their formal learning and on the job experience to enhance their leadership effectiveness. This suggests that for a relatively modest upfront investment in human capital, considerable organisational gains are possible. The extent to which such gains are measurable or can be characterised in monetary terms is discussed, ahead of a conclusion that sets out an agenda for future research to better understand how leadership and its development are conceptualised, operationalised, and realised in public safety agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Police leadership
• public safety
• leadership development
• complexity

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks are due to Mitchell Pearson-Goff, who worked as a research assistant on much of this project, to Professors Mike Hough and Karl Roberts for their comments on an earlier draft, and the two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent advice. Importantly, thanks to the participants in this research, and all others who made this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The aim of this research was to examine behavioural changes using the Leadership Capability Framework, because this is the framework for leadership behaviour utilised by public safety agencies in Australia. Future research should also consider the validity of this Framework however, and undertake analysis to explore the underlying factor structure of leadership.

2. Confirming this is a role for future research.

3. It has been calculated by summing the annual police jurisdictional contributions to the AIPM, with the (discounted) tuition fees for this group, and dividing this number by the minimum participant commitment identified by the jurisdictions for 2014. One figure is presented for both the graduate certificate and the graduate diploma, although in reality the graduate diploma costs more (because it involves eight rather than four subjects). This has been done for parsimony and the resulting calculation can therefore be regarded as a guide only.