Police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice and their trust in the public

Abstract

Research in organizational psychology has consistently demonstrated that employee perceptions of organizational justice have significant effects on employee attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Similar studies utilizing the organizational justice model in policing have also noted these effects, including the relationship of justice perceptions with officer attitudes toward the public. Recent theoretical developments in policing contend that the association between internal perceptions of justice and external attitudes may be the result of organizational and supervisory practices that ‘trickle-down’ into the police-community relationship. This paper explores this association by assessing the effects of officer perceptions of organizational justice on officer trust in the public. A sample of patrol division police officers were surveyed using measures taken from the organizational justice literature and Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s model of organizational trust. Results show a strong relationship between perceptions of organizational justice and trust in the public even when other relevant predictors are controlled.

Keywords:

• Policing
• organizational justice
• trust
• community policing
• police organization

Notes

1. The effects of each dimension of justice on trust is not separately assessed since the paper focuses on the entire organizational environment and not on the separate impact of each dimension of justice. Moreover, the study’s small number of cases precludes testing of each dimension of justice. However, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to assess the dimensionality of all four constructs on organizational justice, the latent variable.

2. While this method of dissemination protected officer privacy and was required by the authors’ institution for the protection of human subjects, it prevented an accurate assessment of officer response rate. The investigators were assured that each officer in the patrol division received the emails, but there was no way to confirm this nor track which officers failed to respond. Based upon the total number of respondents to the survey and the number of officers per department’s patrol division, our best estimate of a response rate is roughly 37%.

3. Tolerance statistics returned values of .671–.966.

4. Confirmatory Factor Analysis of organizational trust with the four justice dimensions as indicator variables produced good model fit when error terms between procedural justice and distributive justice were allowed to covary (CFI = 1.00; NFI = .995; RMSEA >.05; PCLOSE = .468).

5. Age, ethnicity, and gender were dropped from the model as these were not statistically significant.