CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Carlan Philip, (2007) The Search for Job Satisfaction: A Survey of Alabama Policing, American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol 32 (2).

Purpose

The research is about job satisfaction of the police officers in the police department. According to some researchers, job satisfaction is one of the most popular research topics among scholars in the field of industrial/organizational psychology. Although, a majority of researchers have concurred that when employees have high satisfaction, they will become more motivated and thus exhibit improved job performance, how to motivate them continues to be a major concern. Among the various schools of organizational theories, all put an effort towards improved worker efficiency and effectiveness (McGill, 2001). Scholars in the field of criminal justice have also conducted research on employee job satisfaction that has focused on demographic, personal, and organizational factors. While demographic variables are generally comprised of race, gender, educational level, and rank and length of service, personal factors are most commonly used to represent personality characteristics.

Given that police officers are the first-line officials to carry out government policies, they typically must use persuasive and/or coercive methods to elicit law-abiding behavior from citizens. Therefore, the manner in which police perform their duties influences the human rights and perceptions of citizens who are either for or against the government. In other words, the quality of the police service is one indicator that represents how democratic a country is run.

Thus, continuing attempts have been undertaken and applied to refine the assessment techniques in selecting the best applicants for policing and screening out the least appropriate candidates. In the United States, pre-employment psychological screening tests and procedures are commonly employed in the policing sector of the criminal justice system. Quite the opposite, Taiwan's current recruitment procedure involves only a written test; thus, far, psychological screening or personality traits tests have not been utilized.

Prior Research

The relationship between the job satisfaction and the work environment has been recognized for sixty years since Maslow (1943) introduced the theory of the hierarchy of needs. In this , he proposed that humans basic need are fulfilled when they try hard to achieve the higher needs in both public and the private sectors and acknowledging the significance of human motivation. Herzberg and the colleagues (1959) expanded the Maslow's work and argued that the job factors like achievement, recognition, responsibility and the work nature influence the job performance while the three factors like work environment and relations with the supervisors determine the employee satisfaction. The contributions were the stepping stones which influenced a significant body of research in the public and the private sector with about 3000 studies conducted to determine job satisfaction. Since then may researches are conducted in various professional fields, out of which some targets the satisfaction levels among the police officers and the worm and cultural aspects. According to O'Connell (2007), the image of the police is directly related to the issue of performance. The gap occurs between increased crime and police capacity to ...