Abstract
Based on the survey of 495 police officers from the Croatian capital of Zagreb, this chapter explores the relation between organizational justice and police integrity. Grounded in the theory of police integrity and the related methodology developed by Klockars and colleagues, our study incorporates a number of hypothetical scenarios, ranging from police corruption and use of excessive force, to organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance. Bivariate analyses show that, for the overwhelming majority of scenarios included in the questionnaire, the police officers’ evaluations of procedural, distributive, and interactional justice are strongly related to the their evaluations of misconduct seriousness. In subsequent logistic regression models that control for demographic factors (e.g., length of service, supervisory position) and organizational factors (e.g., knowledge of official rules, severity of expected discipline), we find that evaluations of organizational justice are strong predictors of the respondents’ seriousness evaluations in about two-thirds of the scenarios. Our findings also demonstrate that relative evaluations of seriousness (i.e., how serious each scenario is evaluated compared to the other scenarios in the questionnaire) are not related to the police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice.
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Notes
- 1.
The evaluations of seriousness for police corruption and the use of excessive force are based on the earlier police integrity survey of the Croatian police (e.g., Kutnjak Ivković 2015a, b). The ranking of the organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance scenarios is based on the hypothesized seriousness based on the Bennett and Robinson’s typology (2000).
- 2.
The average difference score for each group of police misconduct (e.g., police corruption, use of excessive force) is calculated by adding the percent difference between highest and lowest justice for each of the three scenarios that belong to that group of police misconduct and dividing the number by three.
- 3.
In 5 out of 6 comparisons, the differences were not statistically significant. In particular, the differences were not statistically significant in both scenarios for procedural justice and distributive justice and were not statically significant for Scenario 2 for Scenario 2.
- 4.
However, because of the high correlation between the three measures of organizational justice (Spearman’s rho for the correlation between categorical measures of procedural justice and distributive justice is.683; Spearman’s rho for the correlation between categorical measures of procedural justice and interactional justice is.768; Spearman’s rho for the correlation between categorical measures of distributive justice and interactional justice is.620), we could not use all three measures in the same model; instead, we used the measure of organizational justice created by calculating the sum of all three measures.
- 5.
We have also run the logistic regression models with the organizational justice as a numerical variable, but the results are very similar. In particular, organizational justice measures as a numerical scale was significant in 6 out of 12 scenarios, whereas organizational justice as a categorical scale was significant in 8 out of 12 scenarios. The use of organizational justice as a categorical scale allows us to draw conclusions not only whether organizational justice matters, but also where it matters (e.g., by comparing the views of the respondents with the lowest levels of organizational justice and the respondents with the highest levels of organizational justice).
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Kutnjak Ivković, S., Haberfeld, M.R., Cajner Mraović, I., Prpić, M., Hamm, J.A., Wolfe, S. (2019). Seriousness of Police (Mis)Behavior and Organizational Justice. In: Kutnjak Ivković, S., Haberfeld, M.R. (eds) Exploring Police Integrity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29065-8_4
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