Facilitating Learning to Improve Performance of Law Enforcement Workgroups: The Role of Inclusive Leadership Behavior

ABSTRACT:

This article examines how law enforcement managers may cultivate learning and improve performance of their workgroups by demonstrating inclusive leadership. To this effort, we use multisource survey data that were collected from 104 law enforcement managers, 530 of their direct reports/subordinates, and the managers’ supervisors/bosses. The analysis shows that law enforcement workgroups characterized by a high level of psychological safety are more likely to engage in learning activities than those with a low level of psychological safety. Higher learning effort, in turn, is associated with higher workgroup performance, rated by the managers’ bosses. Finally, we find that inclusive leadership behavior by the law enforcement managers plays an important role in motivating their workgroups to engage in learning and this effect is mediated fully by workgroup psychological safety. We discuss implications of these findings for research on public leadership and the management of law enforcement organizations.

Notes

1 The composite scale score for inclusive leadership behavior is more negatively skewed than the composite scale of other measures. This suggests a potential restriction of range problem. We performed one-way ANOVA to assess whether there is adequate variation in the measure across workgroups. The F-ratio obtained from ANOVA result is statistically significant (p < .05), suggesting there is adequate between-group variation in the data to proceed to multivariate analysis for the hypothesis tests.

2 The correlation coefficients between the two measures reported in these studies are .65 (Bienefeld and Grote 2014), .39 (Carmeli et al. 2010), .62 (Hirak et al 2012), and .62 (Randel et al. 2016).

Additional information

Funding

Fisher College of Business Leadership Initiative Research Grant.

Notes on contributors

Shahidul Hassan

Shahidul Hassan ([email protected]) is associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests are leadership and organizational behavior. He is currently the chair of the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management.

Zhongnan Jiang

Zhongnan Jiang is a doctoral candidate in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. Her research interests are diversity and leadership in public organizations. She earned her MPA from the Bush School of Government at the Texas A & M University. Her research works have appeared in the Journal of Public Policy and Public Administration.