Organizational Justice and Policing

Organizational Justice is a close relative or Procedural Justice.  And if it’s important for officers to treat citizens in a procedurally just manner, it is also important for police supervisors to treat their officers in an organizationally just manner.  Dr. Scott Wolfe explains the application of Organizational Justice in police agencies and how it can mediate the occupational stress of a police officer.

Main Topics

• Organizational Justice entails four components that are applied by police supervisors and leaders.
• An Organizationally Just work environment can reduce the officer’s belief that noble cause corruption is needed to succeed.
• Occupational stress is inevitable, and Organizational Justice can temper that stress.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
When I first read about organizational justice as an aspect of policing, I was reminded of
the sergeant I had many years ago.
Like many businesses or organizations, some sergeants were decent leaders and some supervisors
were, well, not so much.
But organizational justice can be applied to almost any occupation.
If you are not familiar with organizational justice, as you listen to the podcast, you
might actually want to pause it for a second and recall your first job while you were in
high school.
In my case, that was the food service industry or actually any other job you might have had
along the way.
Organizational justice, as will be explained shortly, has distinct echoes of procedural
justice, which was discussed in a previous podcast.
This approach has been promoted in policing for more than a decade.
If procedural justice is good, which I think it is, and organizational justice echoes procedural
justice, which I think it does, then organizational justice should be promoted in police organizations.
But organizational justice is more than just a management approach to enhancing a police
officer's job satisfaction.
It can reverberate down to their street level behavior.
To better understand the idea of organizational justice and its impact on police officers'
thinking and behavior, we are joined today by Professor Scott Wolf.
He's in the PhD program at the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, and
he received his PhD in criminology and criminal justice from Arizona State.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
I appreciate it, Scott.
OK, so my pleasure.
I'm glad you could make it.
Now, you studied a variety of topics.
I don't always cover them in the introduction, but you've also looked at the veil of darkness
as it's related to traffic stops, which I find fascinating.
Police training, the notion of police as warriors and guardians.
Can you give us an overview of why you became interested in organizational justice?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I like that. So.
One thing I'll say before before I answer the question is organizational justice, I've
found over the years is pops up in each of my areas of research.
And so my interest in the idea really got started early in grad school when I started
getting interested in. I wanted to go into law enforcement, so I was interested in working
with police when I got to grad school from a research standpoint.
And I was interested in the factors that contributed to improve community relations.
And so as you talked about earlier, you know, procedural justice is key there.
So a lot of my early research and some of the stuff I still do today focus on procedural
justice when it comes to citizen interactions.
OK, so I started early diving deeper into literature, come to find out procedural
justice is one aspect of a larger idea of justice in the minds of folks.
So really resonated with me that we as people expect fairness from authority figures.
That leads me to do, you know, to continue doing reading in the sense and started getting
to the organizational behavior literature, which actually back dating to the 1970s gives
way to what we talk about in procedural justice and community relations.
So that idea of justice actually started long before it started in work settings.
And so that got me interested.
OK, how do we apply this in a supervisory standpoint, management relations, employee
relations and police agencies?
And then fast forward over the years, you know, I've tried to been adding little pieces
from a research standpoint to the body of literature shows organizational justice is
one of the biggest factors in producing good outcomes for police officers and their
agencies.
Excellent. Yeah, that's this is the thing that crossed my mind as I was reading it back
to reflecting back to graduate school classes on organizational change.
It was like, yeah, this stuff's been around for a while.
But, you know, finally it was catching up into the policing world.
And I like the way you described it.
Is it just the idea of justice in and of itself?
We all like being treated fairly, as I also mentioned in the intro, organizational
justice can be applied to just about any occupation.
Like I said, I reflect back to, you know, 45 years ago when I was working in in
restaurants. But from a broader perspective, why is this area of inquiry of value of
relevance to the police?
Well, I think it's relevant because I mean, just what you're talking about, the
first reason it's relevant is we as humans expect fairness from authority
figures in any domain that we're talking about.
And so police are no different.
This is a really specific, really interesting job.
And they don't get a lot of attention from a research standpoint on what are the
things that go into the recipe of good management, like what makes a good
manager? What do individual, especially street cops, what do they want from their
supervisors? How do they want to be treated?
We don't spend a lot of time thinking about that because there's so much going on
in policing and our attention is focused mostly on, well, their primary job of
addressing crime.
So we spend all of our effort on those types of things and not as much of like,
well, how are we relating with our employees?
Come and find out. That's one of the biggest factors that leads to all the other
good outcomes. The extent to which, you know, a street cop feels supported by
their supervisors is foundational to trying to get them to do anything, right?
If they don't feel like they're supported, if they don't have the back of their
supervisors, it's, you know, good luck trying to get them to buy into any
organizational goal.
Yeah. And again, I'm reminded and I don't want to keep reflecting back to the
19, late seventies and early eighties, but you know, in the food service
industry, industry, you're talking to people and if your boss is a jerk and
you just reamed out in the back room for some reason, it's going to impact how
you interact with the person that on the other side of the counter and that might
not be good. I want to, you know, dive into your, the article you wrote.
Now the paper was titled, if I get this right, Occupational Stress and Attitudes
Towards Misconduct in Police, I'm sorry, in Law Enforcement, the Moderating Role
of Organizational Justice. So there are a couple of things going on in your paper.
Essentially, there is a direct line between the stress that an officer deals
with, you know, typically on the street and maybe, maybe from the supervisor and
then the officer's misconduct, but organizational justice can add or act as
a buffer between those two. Now I've discussed some components of job stress
in a prior podcast, but can you give us a quick review about what you're getting
at here better than I'm explaining it?
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, a lot of the folks that are listening to this are, you
know, this would be preaching the choir. There's a lot of stress in policing.
It's a really unique job, as we all know. The list is almost endless, right? Fast
driving, getting shot at, having to shoot, getting spit on, role ambiguity, like
you know, you want me to be a warrior, you want me to be a guardian, you want me to
be both, what am I supposed to do today? Role conflict, all those things are what
we're talking about when we talk about occupational stress, right? And there's
lots of fronts from a stress standpoint that officers face on a daily basis.
Yeah, that's the thing I've talked about in the past podcasts, the job of a police
officer. I will repeat this constantly. I did this, I gave this to lectured to
students all the time. The job of a cop is not hard. People always say policing
is hard work. It's not hard. It's complicated. And, you know, digging a
ditch with a shovel is hard work. You're dealing with the public and they're
probably not pleased about having to have an interaction with you. They might
be calling you to come and help them deal with the situation. They're probably
not pleased that you pulled them over. So all of those things can result in a
stressful occupation, even if you're trying to keep it, you know, low key,
which is again, then why procedural justice is one of those things are doing
more training on for the police officers. And I think it's it's important to
clarify the type of misconduct when it gets into your paper that you and you
were talking about. Are you talking about corruption, brutality or something
else?
Yeah. So what we know, I mean, backing up one step, like why is it important to
understand the impact of workplace stress is associated with a lot of
different things because officers in particular, right, just like any other
employee will interpret and experience stress in different ways. Right. So
there's a long list of good and bad things that come from stress. One of them
we know in the larger workplace stress literature is like misconduct, right. It
is various forms in, you know, from from stealing things at work to not doing
your job to, you know, you know, time theft, those types of things. And so
when we get to the policing context, those same things hold. Right. But what
we were focused on in this specific study is just officers attitudes about
what we would call noble cause, corruption, dirty, hairy problem. Right.
So to the extent to which is an officer willing to agree with, you know,
sometimes I got to bend the rules because the goal is bigger than the rules
inhibit my ability to achieve that goal. So that's what we're trying to just one
aspect of what we would call corruption and misconduct. And that's what we focus
on in this paper.
Yeah, this is something that probably everybody is aware of the dirty, hairy
problem. I don't remember somebody wrote the article. I think it was actually
called that. And it dealt with the dirty, hairy was that the movie is one of those
things you can talk about for hours. But it's like, you know, he wants to do a
good job, but but he's inhibited from doing it. He knows this person did it,
but he can't do anything about it. So as much as he's a jackass, which he kind of
is, you know, he's trying to do a good thing.
Yeah, and I think it's to add to that, like, it's what becomes interesting in
understanding officers is like, you can, you can, you can empathize with it
because, like the noble why we call it noble cause corruption is policing, in a
general sense, it's a noble pursuit, it's a noble cause. And so therefore, it
becomes easy to corrupt that mission, right, and bend the rules. And that's
what you know, in the movie referred to, obviously, Clint Eastwood plays dirty
hairy does pretty good job at that.
Yeah. Okay, so just for a little more clarification for the listeners, what are
the key aspects of organizational justice?
Yeah, so organizational justice, you can think of is like a larger umbrella term,
right, that is comprised of four main components, each of them kind of hitting
at different things that we expect our authority figures, our supervisors to
treat us with. Okay, so first one kind of deals with outcomes, right, we want
fair outcomes, we call this district distributive justice, right? Do I get
promotions, assignments, based on skill, based on effort, or are those decisions
really based on favoritism and who you know, and arbitrary preferences, which
we've all seen probably, yeah, see a lot, right? I mean, any line of work and
policing is no different. Second big one is, yeah, people are concerned with
outcomes, they're concerned most with the fairness of the distribution of
those outcomes. But even more than that, they care about the process by which
those decisions were made. We call that procedural justice, right? Are the
decisions based on accurate information? Are we, our officers provided a voice
in decision making processes by their supervisors? Is there a chance for
correcting mistakes? Those are all procedural justice. Third component is
how nicely I'm treated by my superior, right? Called that interpersonal justice.
Does my supervisor treat me with respect? Do they treat me with dignity? Do they
avoid treating employees with humiliation, sarcasm, those types of
things? And then the fourth final one, we refer to as informational justice. So do
leaders, do our superiors communicate information to us in a candid way? Is it
clear that they provide adequate explanations? We're not particular, this
is not like the new generation and these kids that are coming up through
the ranks, right? And they, they always want to be explained to. Humans have
wanted an explanation for decisions since the beginning of time. One of the
hallmarks of a good leader is taking ownership over that responsibility. You
have an obligation to your subordinates to explain why you want them to do
things, why you need them to do things. We call it, you know, the geek academic
term, we'll call that informational justice. So those are the four
components that together make up what we refer to as organizational justice.
So you'd be measuring, you might be measuring, because I've read some of
these other articles measuring actually instead of one, just one thing, you're
measuring four different things that might be going on.
Yep, you can, you know, ideally you want to like think about, because they're all
different aspects of a person's, of an employee's views of how fairly I'm being
treated for, to put it very succinctly, how fairly I might be treated is
organizational justice, right? But there's different ways you can look at
that outcome distribution, procedural justice, treatment, and then
information.
Okay, now, when I read these articles from the different scholars, other
things tend to come into my mind. And this might be one of those questions. It
doesn't have to do specifically with your research, but it just, you know, it
generated this thought, can a supervisor be neutral? And what I mean is, it seems
that organizational justice either exists or it doesn't exist, but can there
be a middle ground? Can a supervisor just be there? And, you know, they're not
an asshole, but they're also not being organizationally just in the normal
sense of things. They're just there.
Yeah, that's a cool question. And going back to, you know, what we talked about
before, like any of us, whether it's in policing, any occupation, you can, you've
probably all had that supervisor, right? That's kind of just floating there and
you're like, are you actually a boss? Like, are you? I don't know. It's a good
question. I think my gut says, no, I don't think you can just be there and be
neutral from an organizational justice standpoint. I think the lump on the log,
right? You can't just be a lump on the log, because if you're that type of
person, you're not communicating to your people, right? You're going to come off
as very aloof, right? Which is not a great perception to give to people. They
think you're a prick, right? You're not going to take the time to explain
decisions. You're not going to care about your people and the outcomes they get.
Those are all those things we just got to talk about that they're the antithesis
of justice. And so can you be neutral in the sense like, I think of like each of
these things, like how fairly we think we're being treated by our supervisors
as a continuum. So yeah, there's a middle ground. And so being kind of detached
and kind of just there, the lump on the log is probably better than being like
an overt ass, right? I'm trying not to laugh too much. Right? And we've all
encountered that type of individual too. So it's probably better in that sense,
but I think it's still organizational injustice. It's unfairness because you're
not doing the things that as a leader, your subordinates expect from you. It
goes back to the ownership, right? Like if you're in a position of authority
and you're leading people, that comes with a certain set of requirements and
responsibilities. And if you're not doing those, just passively passing the day,
right? Going throughout the day, you're not doing what you need to lead your
people. Yeah. You know, being an adult, for goodness sake, that's your, that's
your job. Okay. So take a minute to explain how, how your study was done. You
know, what did you want to know? And how did you go about finding it?
Yeah, good academic fashion. We try to find different ways to, to, to, to use
data. So this, it was survey based projects. So we did surveys with a number
of police officers, I think from eight different police agencies in the state
of California. It was, it was part of a larger project. So the officer safety
wellness project where we were trying to better understand the predictors of
officer involved crashes to hopefully improve an understanding of that. So we
can improve the safety among, you know, for driving among cops. So as part of
that, there's lots of different factors that go into predicting driving
behavior. So we had all these different elements of workplace stress,
perceptions of organizational justice, of our supervisors, all those types of
things that we measured simultaneously on that survey, and it opened the door
for, for us to do this project as well.
All right, so based on all that information, what did you find?
Sure. Yeah. So a couple big findings, right? First, from a stress standpoint,
we kind of replicate what you would expect in other workplace settings.
Officers that feel like they have higher levels of stress, we measured that by a
more extreme workload relative to their peers, right? So more stressful
workload is associated with a higher tendency for an officer to agree that
sometimes I got to bend the rules to get my job done, right? Noble cause, dirty
hairy, corruption. Second is that organizational justice is associated
with those same types of noble, that corruption beliefs. So if I believe my
supervisors are not kind, they're not respectful, they don't take time to
explain things to me, all of the things that are injustice, more likely to adhere
to that, that corrupt attitude. Okay. And then when you bring those together,
right, it's like, well, stress is kind of ubiquitous in many different forms in
policing. You can't, you can't remove stress, it's inherent in the job. And so
what do we do from a practical standpoint, to help officers deal with
the stress and then also not have stress lead to negative outcomes for the agency,
like corrupt attitudes and then potentially behavior itself. So what we
show is even if you have, you know, different levels of stress from a
workload, you can buffer, you say that's a good word you used earlier, it's a
protective factor, organizational justice, right? So if officers perceive a
high level of justice, they feel fairly treated, respected, etc., given an
opportunity to voice their opinions. If they feel that way from their
supervisors, that seems to protect officers from the harmful effect of
stress on misconduct. So it kind of mitigates the role of stress that a lot
of different officers are going to experience, right? And so the practical
implication of that is it underscores, right, as a management kind of strategy
philosophy, organizational justice has like wide ranging implications, because
not only does it itself reduce the currents of misconduct, but it can
mitigate the effects of other things that are really hard to target. It's hard
to reduce stress, you can't take it away. It's hard to train officers to manage
it, right? And so just going a little bit out of your way to ensure that you're
taking the time to care for your people, explain to them what's going on, all of
that type of thing that we talked about with organizational justice, that serves
as that protective factor. And like important thing that maybe some folks
that are listening are like, well the biggest stress is being treated like
crap by my superior, right? Indeed that's the case and that's one of the things
that really comes out of this, the larger literature, why organizational justice is
so important, especially in an occupation like policing, right? All of that when we
talked about that list of stress that officers face, they knew that coming in,
right? They don't want to deal with that stress, but it's the nature of
the job, they're cool with that. What we're not cool with is when I go, I go
from the street where I encounter that stress and that danger and all the crap,
and then I go back into the station house, into the agency, and I don't have
the back of my superiors that put me out on the street, right? That betrayal is the
highest level of stress that anybody's gonna experience. Okay, so based on your
research, based on your findings, can you identify two or three implications for
police training, the practice, even administrators? Yeah, organizational
justice matters to police supervisors. They should care about it because it's
one of the main things that your people care about, right? They want to be treated
fairly, they want to be provided information, they want transparency, and
it's more than just an academic type of discussion, right? Those types of things
need to be kind of like the foundation of how you do supervision and you manage.
That's a great way to say it. Every decision, right, you have to do organizational justice, it should be a
guiding framework. It's not the end-all be-all, but it's like it should be in the
background all of the time because people, your people, care mainly about how
they're being treated, right? You're gonna have to deliver a whole lot of
bad outcomes in policing, right, to the public, to your, to your, to even
sometimes to your own people in the form of, you know, punishments or whatever it
might be. These people, your employees, are okay with receiving negative
outcomes if the process that led to it was legit and they trust it, right? When
they don't have the information about how the decision was made, one
information went into it, that leads us in different directions of like, what was
it based on this characteristic of me? Is it because they have a favoritism over
that person and they hate me? That opens the door for getting ticked off, right? So
it matters in that sense, and so we should care about it, and it matters in a
lot of different domains. One, to use my own work that bridges some of my
areas that is important that we often struggle with is getting officers
motivated to train, right? So in my work on training evaluation, one of the big
things that we find is regardless of the quality of a training program, if
officers aren't motivated, they're not going to be receptive to it. Okay. And
wouldn't you know, what is one of the biggest factors that leads to motivation
to go into a training room for required training that's so awesome to be part of
and we can all think of it, especially like online training, oh gosh, right? So
exciting. Well, what we find is officers that feel like they're in an environment
where they have their back, they're supported by their supervisors, right?
And they have their best interests in mind, dramatically more motivated to go
into the training room, regardless of the topic and the mode, right? Okay. And so
that's really important from a management standpoint because that's an
easy way, it's hard to get them into required training, they have to do it,
right? And so that's one of a long list of good things. You can increase
motivation and receptivity to training, regardless of the quality of the training
program, by the way, not that you want crap training, but you can increase that
among your officers just by ensuring that you're doing the right thing from a
supervision standpoint beforehand. It's almost like there are two work
environments. There's the street environment where you're dealing with the
public and the people, and then there is the work environment of the station
house or wherever, you know, where we might be working, where it's okay that
I'm dealing with my colleagues and my supervisor, that's where my boss sees me.
So it seems like there are two. Now, I do want to ask this about the idea of
policy implication. As far as promotions go, is this something that could be used
for the promotional process, whether it's, okay, what do you know about
organizational justice to be able to say, okay, I know a lot about it, I
learned about it, and here's what it is to make that step to sergeant, or is it
something that should be part of their training when they become a sergeant?
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts there. So for
one, I think officers and other management positions are probably
trained on aspects of organizational justice, even though we don't use the
academic term. Right. Right. And a lot of folks are good at it naturally
because we know how to communicate with people. Right. You've got you become a
good communicator, not because you heard some professor at Michigan State
University talk to you about justice, and why it matters. It's like, well, you
know what people expect, and you know what you want. That doesn't mean that it
shouldn't be part of training. And it's probably an open question. Hopefully, we
get better answers to of, well, can you specifically teach officers the
components of organizational justice, why it's important, and how to actually
use it in practice? And does that translate into good outcomes? Probably,
right? But it's worth kind of investigating whether that does indeed
happen. And I think that's going to be the next step from a research
standpoint, that hopefully we can help some agencies answer that question.
That's all talking about like, what works in management? I mean, we don't
have a lot of research evidence, we have good experience, anecdotal evidence, we
have ideas about what we think would work. But that needs to scale up. See if
we can train it.
Okay, so we have a few minutes left. Is there anything you wanted to cover that
I might have missed?
No, I think we, you know, there's a lot of different directions you can go in. I
am always struck in these types of conversations, especially when you talk
about this idea among cops, you get the smirks of, well, yeah, you're talking
about stress in my job. And like I said earlier, the biggest stress is poor
supervision, poor leadership, good leadership, taking ownership of that
responsibility from a police manager standpoint, whether it's you're, you're a
patrol sergeant, or you're all the way up to the chief's office, right, is so
important because people go into this job because they are pursuing a noble
effort, right? They're motivated to help people and address crime, right? And they
accept that that is fine, right? It's dangerous, cool. That might even be one of
the reasons we join the job. That's cool. I can't deal with supervisors, though,
that don't have my back. Not not talking fully committed, like a corrupt way.
Don't explain the reasons for their actions. Don't treat me with dignity.
Don't treat me like I'm part of the team. As soon as you sever that relation, you
lose your people, right? And that's a principle of any type of leadership
philosophy, no different than police station.
Well, yeah, I've got to tell you, this was a good conversation. I'm really
appreciative of it. And like I said, when I was reading about it, I've read about
organizational justice before, and then this was the, it was the idea of the, the
corruption, well, I won't call it corruption, but the misbehavior in
between and how this would mediate that from the behavior on the street. And
then your conversation about how this gets people into the classroom, they're
just, they are supported. Therefore, I'll go to this training, even if I'm not
thrilled to do it. So the idea of organizational justice, I think this was
one of those things that's, it's kind of like low key. It's in the, it's in the
background of policing that nobody's really paying attention to right now as
wellness and AI and those kinds of things. But this is a topic that needs to
be promoted out there. So I'm really happy, Scott, that you came on the
podcast. I appreciate the time. Thanks for reaching out. You have a great day.
Take care. You too.
That's it for this episode of the police in service training podcast. I want to
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