Volunteer Involvement and Organizational Performance: The Use of Volunteer Officers in Public Safety

Abstract

Scholars have discussed how volunteer involvement in public organizations may expand the capacity of existing personnel to improve service levels. However, few studies have explored the extent to which such benefits are realized across large, representative samples of public organizations. Using data from a national survey of law enforcement agencies within the United States, this article examines the relationship between volunteer officers and organizational performance. The notion of critical mass leads to the expectation that organizations must involve a large enough share of volunteers to generate a significant impact on performance. The findings reveal that an increase in volunteers is positively associated with clearing violent crimes, while the relationship turns negative beyond a threshold. For property crime clearance, the relationship is negatively associated with performance until the proportion of volunteers reaches a critical mass, in which the relationship turns positive. Overall, the results provide evidence for the role that critical mass plays in terms of explaining the contribution of volunteers to performance.

Keywords:

• performance measurement
• public safety
• volunteers

Notes

1 Some agencies report a clearance rate greater than 100%. While agencies cannot report more clearances than offenses in a given month, an exception is when agencies score clearances that were reported in previous months (U.S. Department of Justice, 2013b, p. 113). For instance, if a suspect is arrested for one offense in January but is subsequently identified in connection with four other separate offenses reported in prior months, this adds up to five cleared offenses for the month of January.

2 Index crimes comprise criminal homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Violent crime consists of criminal homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crimes are composed of burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.

3 This does not mean that performance increases indefinitely since the maximum share of volunteer officers is 19% for this sample of agency sizes (full-time officers of 250 or more).

4 Although not included in Appendix 1, the correlation between agency size, as measured by the number of full-time sworn officers only, not by per capita, and property crime rate is 0.39, indicating this could be a possibility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seong C. Kang

Seong C. Kang recently received his doctorate from the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia and is joining the faculty at the Department of Government at New Mexico State University. His research interests include public and nonprofit organization theory, human resource management, and performance measurement.