Innovation in the Police Organization and the Police Officer

• In Event: Inside Police Organizations: Innovation, Organizational Justice and Deviance

Abstract

How does the innovativeness of a police organization affect the police who work there? Do more innovative organizations experience greater or weaker commitment to the agency and its top leadership? Although reformers and progressive police leaders often present innovation as an essential strategy for overcoming organizational challenges to improve performance, those who work in the organization may anticipate and experience a wide range of risks and uncertainties associated with the changes that innovation entails. Anticipating that the effects of innovativeness may not be uniform, what sorts of police employees are most and least affected by the degree of the department’s innovativeness at any given time and the department’s history of innovation over time? Drawing on National Police Research Platform data on police officers and police chief executives, this paper develops measures of police organization innovativeness and examines the relationship of these indicators to officer attitudes toward innovation, their commitment to the organization, and their job satisfaction. The nature and extent to which these relationships vary by officers’ characteristics are examined.

Authors

• Stephen Mastrofski, George Mason University

• Matthew D. Kenyon, George Mason University