Exploring the effects of different workplace trust variables on the work attitudes of police officers

ABSTRACT

Public trust in the police is an important element of a healthy democracy. Concurrently, trust within the workplace is essential for a healthy organization, including the police. The main forms of organizational trust are management, supervisor, and coworker trust. However, there has been little research on how organizational trust affects police officers. This study examines the effects of these three forms of organizational trust on the job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment of police officers. The sample of 827 officers was drawn from two districts in Haryana, India. The findings indicate that all three forms of trust play an important role in improving the work attitudes of Indian police officers and that personal characteristics account for a lesser variance than the trust variables.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• India
• trust
• job involvement
• job satisfaction
• organizational commitment

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. These comments and suggestions improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Officers from these districts have been studied in other published research (e.g., Lambert et al., 2017, 2015; Qureshi et al., 2019). In addition, the data used in the current study have been used in other studies. The full citations of these past studies are available upon request. None of the past research involving officers from these or other districts in India examined the connection of management trust, supervisor trust, and coworker trust with job involvement, job satisfaction, or organizational commitment.

2. The multivariate analyses were redone with tenure with the Haryana police agency in place of tenure in the current position. The regression results did not change in terms of significant predictors for the three job attitudes. Since it was not measured in the survey, it was not possible to test the effects of overtime in policing or the criminal justice system. Future research should measure the total time spent policing and the total time spent working in criminal justice to see if including this variable changes the findings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric G. Lambert

Eric G. Lambert is a faculty member in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs in the College of Health and Human Services at Indiana University Northwest. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany. His research interests include organizational issues, job and organizational effects on the attitudes, intentions, and behaviors of criminal justice employees, and the international perceptions, attitudes, and views on criminal justice issues.

Hanif Qureshi

Hanif Qureshi is an Indian police official who earned a Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. His research interests are policing, organizational issues, community-police relations, and the effects of workplace factors on criminal justice employees.

James Frank

James Frank is a faculty member in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the School of Criminal Justice at the Michigan State University. His primary research interests include understanding police behavior at the street level, the formation of citizen attitudes toward the police, and the use of evolving technology by patrol officers.