Impact of Organizational Justice and Perceived Organizational Support on Effectiveness of Police Crime Control

Abstract

The main purpose of the research is to examine impact of organizational justice and perceived organizational support on effectiveness of crime control in police organizations. This research employs a survey questionnaire to measure organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and effectiveness of crime control. The number of subject of the study is 285 police officers working in Daegu metropolitan city and some cities of Gyeongsangbuk-do province. The study employs regression analysis to analyze the effect of organizational justice and perceived organizational support on police performance. As the result of analysis, the effect of organizational justice on effectiveness of crime control is statistically significant at the level 0.01, perceived organizational support at the level 0.05. The key finding of this study is that in the performance-based management system, the reciprocal relationships between managers and individual officers with organizational justice and perceived organizational support play an important role in building a sustainable growth system in the police.

1. Introduction

The final goal of an organization has a close relationship with improving its performance or productivity, which is the ultimate reason why an organization is to be. Since interests in researches on organizations, researchers have focused on how to manage organizations for improvement of productivity. Based on the approach of classical organizational theory, productivity that organizations can create depends on their structure of production. They believe in the myth that there is the best way to maximize productivity with the viewpoint of engineering. Under the mechanic approach for design of organizational structure, employees are not an important part in the process of organizational production. Manpower, however, is a decisive element in the process of production. Due to this viewpoint, there have been the various attempts to drive employees within organizations into positive behaviors for enhancing performance utilizing ways to go up motivation.

There is the very distinguish point that committed employees display more positive attitudes and behaviors at work than uncommitted employees[1][2]. According to the point, letting employees to be into organizational commitment plays a very important role in improving and soaring up organizational performance, so researchers have interested in organizational commitment.

The affective dimension of commitment is found to have the strongest relationships with several organization-and employee-relevant outcomes[2]. Among antecedents of the affective dimension of commitment, perceived organizational support is found to have the strongest positive relationship with affective organizational commitment[2] for organizational performance. Plus, organizational justice has been considered as an important antecedent in the context.

There is the common thing that can be found in conceptualizing perceived organizational support and organizational justice in the causal relationship with organizational performance. Two concepts are based on reciprocity and social exchange processes which can make employees committed in improving and creating organizational performance. Fairness in the process of reward distribution and perception about organization’s attitude toward employees’ contributions lie at the core of reciprocity and social exchange processes between managers and employees. These fairness and perception have been considered as factors that can have an influence on organizational performance. Two recent meta-analyses on the effects of justice in organizations and support from them show that the various combinations of organizational justice and perceived organizational support have implications for how employees react in creating organizational performance when they face with different managing approaches[3][4].

Police organizations in Korea have tried to enhance organizational performance since introduction of Eared Value Management System like BSC, Performance Management System, etc. They have mainly focused on raising up performance through change and improvement of organizational structure such as executing programs for performance management, restructuring organization and work system, and enacting various rules and regulations. Organizational structure-oriented-performance management have contributed to establishment of meritocracy in police organizations, but individuals in police organizations have not still got higher fitness and satisfaction with performance management system. They insist that there are unfairness in reward distributions and less opportunities to get good treatments from performance assessment. Managerial strategy focusing on building up performance through making changes in organizational structure definitely has limits in driving up employees’ commitments on performance improvement because it looks over that employee attitude toward organizational performance can make or break performance management in the police.

Focusing on employee attitude in creating organizational performance is to approach personal resource- oriented-performance management which highlights that organizational commitment is a main factor in making higher performance and keeping performance improvement sustainable. Based on the approach, the study is to examine impact of organizational justice and perceived organizational support on performance in police organizations.

2. Theoretical Context

We are supposed to review the main three subjects-organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and effectiveness of police’s crime control as an organizational performance-that are a researching target for researchers who are studying and examining organizational management and strategy for spurring organizational goals in the police.

When discussing about organizational justice, justice is said to be ‘fair’ on rewards from evaluative consequences based on employees’ contributions on creating organizational performance. This conceptual approach depends on Adam’s (1963) research on equity theory stressing the value of distributive justice in the organizational context[5]. The concept of distributive justice concerns the perceived fairness of outcomes assigned out of from appraisal on employees’ output. Employees who perceive their superiors to distribute outcomes (e.g., pay and promotion decisions) fairly to all subordinates of equal status have been shown to increase both the quantity and quality of their work production[3]. According to implications drawn from the concept, reward distributions that are perceived by employees to be unfair can have a negative influence on their emotions, cognitions, and their behavior toward creation of organizational performance. People in the top of organizations, however, are from time to time likely to depend on economic and political decisions made under the uncertain and risky conditions of organizational management. The gap between employees’ perception and top managers’ decisions on the reward distributions should be considered the core element making and breaking for organizational justice.

When researchers working at the field of organizational management discuss organizational justice, they are likely to take a descriptive approach[6]. In the approach, organizational scientists are spending a lot of time on examining the antecedents of fairness perceptions and then applying for practices considering the consequences of those evaluative judgments[7].

Organizational justice is a multi-dimensional conception, although there are some different opinions, most scholars tend to agree that there are three main components of organizational justice-distributive, procedural, and interactional-that if followed by top managers have close relationships with positive outcomes for the organization[3]. There are some different definitions on three main components of organizational justice. We will look at the common definitions on them instead of discussing about scholars’ their own conceptual approaches. First, distributive justice judgments are typically assessed as a balance of efforts and outcomes. Distributive justice refers to the fairness of one’s outcomes from a decision-making system. Second, the procedural-justice perspective emphasizes the perceived fairness of the process by which the outcome was determined. The perspective shows that the fairness of the process by which an outcome is reached is often more important than the distributional fairness of the outcome[8]. A third form of justice, interactional justice, emphasizes the role of supervisor politeness, honesty, and respect during the interpersonal communication with and treatment of employees[3].

Based on the social exchange theory, employees assess and make judgment about relationships at work on the basis of the degree of reciprocity[9]. In the theory, reciprocity between organizations and employees determines the perceived balance of exchange and the intensity of relationships. Perceived organizational support is defined as that organization takes care of employee’s socio-emotional needs, efforts, commitment and loyalty. That is, employees develop a general perception concerning the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being[10][11].

In general, employees are likely to consider positive discretionary activities by the organization that benefited them as evidence that the organization cared about their well-being[12]. Organizational rewards represent an investment by the organization in the employee and are interpreted by the employee as an indication of organizational appreciation and recognition, and thus, contribute to the development of POS[13]. Providing potential career opportunities such as promotions may imply a high level of concern for employees and the recognition of their contributions by the organization[14].

Perceived organizational support can be assessed in various parts consisting of organizational structure and practice that are closely related to organizational success. Perceived organizational support indicates supervisory support, autonomy in which they are received to carry out the job, wide varieties of rewards and working conditions, developmental opportunities to expand their skills, and recognition from the top management[14][15][16][17].

It is not kind of difficult to define performance with some words relating to the output from organizational activities. Performance, however, is a concept showing multi-dimensional meanings depending on types of organizations, missions and objectives pursued, and relationships with outside environments.

Instead of making an effort of getting the definition of performance, more importantly, it is needed to show appropriate and valid indicators that can measure an organizational performance representing outputs and outcomes from an organizational management and operation.

Over the past two decades a number of reviews of the policing evaluation literature have focused on the question of what police can do to most effectively address crime and disorder. It is said that policing has a direct association with reducing and controlling crimes.

The previous studies have established causal relationships between organizational justice and perceived organizational support and organizational performance. Research has revealed that organizational justice is related to increased work performance, whereas organizational injustice is associated with counterproductive work behavior[3][4][18]. Perceived organizational support was found to be positively correlated with organizational performance[19][20][21].

3. Data and Method

3.1 Sample

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of organizational justice and perceived organizational support on effectiveness of crime control by the police. The study is based on statistical analyses as an empirical research to test the effect of reciprocity and exchange relationship, well known as essential triggers for motivation and commitment, between organizations and employees on organizational performance. The data used for the statistical analyses were from a survey targeting police officers who work in Daegu metropolitan city and some cities of Gyeongsangbuk-do province in Korea. The surveyors met the prospective respondents at their offices to conduct the survey through a random sampling. It was conducted for two months, September and October, in 2018.

Sample data were collected from 285 respondents, giving a response rate of 77.8%. The demographics of the respondents are shown in Table 1. Respondents in the sample were between 20 and 71 years of age (M = 43.6 years), 55.6% were male, 44.4% were married, 63.9% had attained more than a college qualification, and 68.2% have been living in the survey areas for more than 5 years. It is worthy to note that the respondents tended to be a little bit old and more educated. In particular, the response rate of men was higher than the one of women.

Table 1. Demographics of Respondents (N=285)

3.2 Measures

Procedural justice.

This research measured organizational justice by using six items for the three aspects of organizational justice-distributive, procedural, and interactional-on the same 5-point Likert-type scale based on Cohen-Charash & Spector(2001) and Colquitt et al.(2001)[3][4]. First, The questions of distributive justice are as follows: (1) Disciplinary action is a result of pressure on supervisors from command staff to give out discipline, and (2) Getting special assignments in the police department depends on who you know, not on merit. Second, the questions of procedural justice are as follows: (3) When a police officer appears before the Police Board of Inquiry, the officer will probably be found guilty even when he/she has a good defense, and (4) The rules and regulations dealing with officer conduct are fair and sensible. Last, the questions of interactional justice are follows: (5) When you get to know the department from the inside, you begin to think that it is a wonder that it does one-half as well as it does, and (6) Police supervisors are very interested in their subordinates.

Perceived organizational support.

POS was measured by using the original version of POS scale, including 36 measures, developed by Eisenberger et al. (1986)[22]. This research measured police officer’s perception of organizational support using the four highest loading items of the shorter eight-item version of the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support on the same 5-point Likert-type scale by Eisenberger et al. (1986)[22]. The questions of POS are follows: (1) The organizational cares about my opinion; (2) The organization fails to appreciate extra effort from me; (3) The organization tries to make my job as interesting as possible; (4) The organization values my contribution to its well-being; (5) The organization takes pride in my accomplishments at work; (6) The organization is willing to give me help when I need a favor; (7) The organization disregards my best interest when it makes decisions that affect me; (8) If the organization could hire someone to replace me at a lower salary it would do so.

Effectiveness of crime control.

This research measured effectiveness of crime control by five questions from Sunshine and Tyler (2003)[23] on 5-point Likert-type scales, with a higher score indicating more favorable evaluations. The questions are as follows: (1) The police respond promptly to calls about crimes; (2) The police are always ready to provide satisfactory assistance to victims of crime; (3) The police are always able to provide the assistance the public need from them; (4) The police are doing well in controlling violent crime; (5) I feel safe walking in my neighborhood in the night.

4. Results

A factor analysis was conducted to test for the assumed conceptual differentiation between the individual variables used to construct each scales (see Table 2). Many of the items used to construct these scales were based on previous work. As can be seen from Table 2, no overlap between the constructed scales is detected. As we can see from the figure 1, all factor loading-values of these items are significant (p<0.05) and all Squared Multiple Correlations-values are higher than 0.4. Table 2 also shows Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients of organizational justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional), POS, and effectiveness of crime control. As can be seen, the Cronbach alpha coefficients of each scale are reasonably reliable scales.

Table 3 shows the correlation coefficients between organizational justice, perceived organizational support and effectiveness of crime control. In Table 3, it is seen that distributive justice (r=.350, p < 0.01), procedural justice (r=.373, p < 0.01), interactional justice (r=.313, p < 0.01), and perceived organizational support (r=.199, p < 0.01) are most closely related to effectiveness of crime control. This may have implications for the findings obtained by regression analysis

To isolate the impact of each variable on effectiveness of crime control, an OLS regression analysis was performed on the full sample. The results are presented in Table 4. These results show that distributive justice (β = .415, p < 0.01), procedural justice (β = .312, p < 0.01), interactional justice (β = .358, p < 0.01), and perceived organizational support (β = .025, p < 0.05) are predictors of effectiveness of crime control. As can be seen, about 78.1% of the variation in perception of effectiveness of crime control could be explained by organizational justice and perceived organizational support.

Figure 1. Research Framework

Table 2. Factor analysis and reliability analysis to variables used in the study

Table 3. Relationships between Organizational justice, POS, and Effectiveness of crime control​​​​​​​

1: Distributive justice, 2: Procedural justice, 3: Interactional justice, 4: Perceived organizational support, 5: Effectiveness of crime control

*p< 0.01 (two-tailed test)

Table 4. OLS regression analysis of effectiveness of crime control​​​​​​​

*p< 0.05, ** p< 0.01

5. Conclusion

The main purpose of the research is to examine the impact of organizational justice and perceived organizational support on effectiveness of crime control in the police. The analysis shows that organizational justice and perceived organizational support have positive influences on effectiveness of crime control as police organization’s main performance. There is a significant difference in the impact of organizational justice and perceived organizational support. The impact of perceived organizational support is significantly less than one of organizational justice. It shows that there is a limit to apply perceived organizational support for public organizations such as the police although police officers are premised as employees in private organizations with a strong motivation like various rewards. Police officers have a different motivation from employees working for enterprises pursuing private interest. Public employees have public service motivation that highlights an importance of public interest instead of providing welfare and reward for them.

The key finding of this study is that we can identify the causal relationship between organizational justice and perceived organizational support and effectiveness of crime control and these causal relationships presented in the research framework does seem to be sufficiently applicable to the police in South Korea. In particular, in the performance-based management system for the police, it is very important to spur police officers’ commitment on the organization in terms of creating sustainable performance like reducing crimes.

Based on the results of the analysis, this study provide some actions that police administrators can take to increase individual officer’s performance for controlling crimes. First, police organizations should fairly allocate promotions and special assignments to police officers and make them understandable on why such decisions are made by using various ways of persuasion. Second, they should fairly distribute disciplinary actions and clearly explain the reasons for such actions that can give individual officers limits of their behaviors. Third, they should ensure that the process and procedure of reward decision are fairly made based on the reliable assessment of performance. Finally, police agencies should honestly show subordinate officers that they care for their well-being and that their opinions are taken seriously.

In the end, organizational justice and perceived organizational support offer an important theoretical perspective of police’ performance management, yet further analysis is required. Specifically, some research is needed to better measure variables of organizational justice, perceived organizational support, and effectiveness of crime control. Although it is plausible to assume that many organizational factors related to employees’ commitment contribute to the organizational performance, it may also be highlighted that the reciprocal relationships between managers and individual officers with organizational justice and perceived organizational support play an important role in building a sustainable growth system in the police.