Police Officer Job Satisfaction

Abstract

The literature on police officers’ job satisfaction to date has focused primarily on individual officers’ demographic characteristics, while a few recent studies have demonstrated that officers’ job task characteristics are a principal source of job satisfaction. The present study expanded on this prior research by simultaneously analyzing three dimensions of correlates of job satisfaction: officers’ demographic characteristics, officers’ job task characteristics, and officers’ organizational environment characteristics. This was the first such study to include the dimension of organizational characteristics in the study of police officer job satisfaction. The analysis of survey data from a sample of patrol officers from 11 law enforcement agencies in the southwestern United States suggested that the officers’ job task characteristics were a principal source of job satisfaction. Organizational environment characteristics also played an important, but weaker, role in the shaping of officer job satisfaction.