Organizational trust and correctional staff job stress: a test among Nigerian prison officers

ABSTRACT

An abundance of research indicates that organizational variables influence organizational success. Perception of organizational trust is one such variable; however, the literature examining this variable is sparse, and internationally focused research on organizational trust even more so. At a time when public safety and employee wellness are priorities in the correctional environment, a clearer understanding of the relationship between organizational trust and job stress is necessary. This study contributes to this literature by examining the relationships between different types of organizational trust (coworker, supervisor, and management) and job stress among Nigerian correctional staff. Results indicate that coworker and management trust were associated with lower stress from work, but supervisor trust had no significant relationship with stress.

KEYWORDS:

• Management trust
• coworker trust
• supervisor trust
• job stress
• correctional staff
• Nigeria

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewers, editor, and editorial staff for their review of the paper. Their comments and suggestions improved the manuscript. O. Oko Elechi and Eric Lambert contributed equally to this paper and are listed in alphabetical order. The authors thank Janet Lambert for her proofreading.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The questionnaire had 106 questions on various areas, including other areas than those researched in the current study. The data from the questionnaire has been used in other studies, such as exploring how workplace variables were associated with job involvement, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job stress, the correlates of life satisfaction, the correlates of job burnout, organizational justice views, and work-family conflict for Nigerian correctional staff. Full citations of past studies are available by contacting the first author. None of the past studies examined how organizational trust views were associated with job stress of the surveyed Nigerian prison staff.

2 Cullen et al. (1985) originally used six items to measure job stress. Due to the limitations on the length of the questionnaire, we selected the four items from Cullen et al. based on the face validity of the measures. Future research should measure job stress with all six items from Cullen et al. to determine whether the results significantly change.

3 The specific results for the exploratory factor analysis using SPSS with principal axis factoring with Direct Oblimin rotation are available by contacting the first author.

4 The current results were only compared with the results from Haynes et al. (2020) because the current study and the one from Haynes et al. were the only two studies that included coworker, supervisor, and management trust with job stress in the same multivariate analyses and multivariate regression analysis controls for shared effects between independent variables (trust variables in this case) and may change the results when coworker trust is included. Lambert et al. (2008) also reported that both supervisor and management trust was negatively related to U.S. correctional staff job stress, which further supports the contention that management trust may be universal in its association with correctional staff job stress and supervisor trust may be contextual.