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Managing a Criminal Justice Crisis: An Organizational Justice Understanding of Change in a Sheriff’s Office

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Abstract

The research related to organizational justice in criminal justice agencies has specifically examined the police departments and prisons, but sheriff’s offices have been absent from examination. This study’s data come from a sheriff’s office in California after a significant organizational change instigated by the implementation of Assembly Bill 109. Similar to most organizational change, this modification was instigated by the administration without seeking employee input. For this study, a total N of 229 employees (92 % of employees) responded to a survey instrument. Using measures of procedural justice as the independent variable and distributive and interactional justice measures as the control variables, the findings demonstrate employees furthest from the organizational decision-making are least likely to support the change. Measures of distributive justice were non-significant in all models and measures of interactional justice were uneven in different models. This research addresses a gap in the current literature by examining a sheriff’s office, but generalizablility of the findings are limited.

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Notes

  1. Golden County is a pseudonym.

  2. The survey contained a Likert 5-point scale for responses; however, the authors collapsed the scale into disagree (0) and agree (1).

  3. Two-tailed significance tests.

  4. Variance inflation factor estimates remained were within an acceptable range.

  5. The authors used one-tailed significance tests for the model associations based on theoretical expectations.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Sheriff of Golden County and the employees of the Golden County Sheriff’s Office for their participation.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest with this study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. California State University, Butte Hall 741, Chico, CA, 595929-0455, USA

    Ryan Patten, Jonathan W. Caudill, Matthew O. Thomas & Sally Anderson

  2. Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, 2101 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO, 80208-8921, USA

    Stephanie E. Bor

Authors
  1. Ryan Patten
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  2. Jonathan W. Caudill
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  3. Stephanie E. Bor
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  4. Matthew O. Thomas
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  5. Sally Anderson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ryan Patten.

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Patten, R., Caudill, J.W., Bor, S.E. et al. Managing a Criminal Justice Crisis: An Organizational Justice Understanding of Change in a Sheriff’s Office. Am J Crim Just 40, 737–749 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-015-9291-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-015-9291-9

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