Abstract
United Kingdom Police custody is one of the most challenging of work environments, liable to excessive demands and reduced well-being. Being difficult to access, it is also a much-neglected area of research that has focused on one or two roles, rather than the full range available, and on individual-level research, rather than a more comprehensive multilevel understanding of how organizational culture and climate can simultaneously influence a range of well-being outcomes. The present longitudinal study explored all types of roles, in both the public and private sectors, across seven English police forces and 26 custody sites (N = 333, response rate 46.57%, with repeated returns = 370). The Integrated Multilevel Model of Organizational Culture and Climate (IMMOCC) was applied to examine the organizational-level influences on individual well-being. Results indicated that (1) custody sergeants were most vulnerable to low well-being, followed by publicly contracted detention officers; (2) shared leadership (a source of team cohesion) was linked to four of six well-being outcomes; (3) two sub-components of culture reflected tensions never acknowledged before, especially in respect of role; and (4) reverse relationships existed between well-being outcomes and the dimensions of culture and climate. The findings inform practical recommendations, including resilience training and the need to raise the status of police custody, while also highlighting concerns about private sector scrutiny that may be relevant to other professions.
Highlights
While general policing in England and Wales has been viewed as more stressful than specialist departments like police custody, the opposite is true when it comes to police sergeant custody officer burnout [1,2,3]
Shared leadership and well-being belief culture were generally far more positive than the completely negative normative belief culture. These results are a stark contrast to Hypothesis 3 (H3), since H3 focused on well-being outcomes, whereas Hypothesis 4 (H4) focused on shared leadership, sub-components of culture, and climate as former predictors
It was found that custody sergeants had the lowest well-being followed by public detention officers, while custody assistants enjoyed the highest well-being followed by private detention officers (H1)
Summary
While general policing in England and Wales has been viewed as more stressful than specialist departments like police custody, the opposite is true when it comes to police sergeant custody officer burnout [1,2,3]. It is behavioral in terms of working productively and fruitfully/creatively and able to contribute to one’s community It is psychosocial, in terms of realizing/developing one’s potential, coping with the normal stresses of life, and building strong, positive relationships, and both behavioral and psychosocial, in terms of fulfilling personal and social goals and achieving a sense of purpose in society. Note that organizational culture is multidimensional, with two subcomponents: outcome expectations, normative expectations, and a third component of control belief climate (see Figure 1). Schein [12] defined organizational culture, as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by [an organization] as it solved its problems of external adaptation (outcome expectation) and internal integration (normative expectation), which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, to be taught to new [staff] members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”. Reciprocal relationships exist between well-being outcomes and culture predictors of well-being, such that well-being outcomes (role well-being, well-being stress, mental and subjective well-being, energy, and engagement) influence predictor variables (well-being belief culture, normative belief culture, and control belief culture)
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