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Justice and Life Satisfaction Among Indian Police Officers: A Preliminary Study

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Abstract

The concept of organizational justice refers to employee perceptions about whether the employing organization treats workers in a fair and just manner. Policing research has shown that officers’ organizational justice views are associated with various salient outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and misconduct). No research has been published on the relationship of justice views and the life satisfaction of police officers. The current preliminary study explored how distributive and procedural justice were related to life satisfaction based on self-reported survey data from 827 police officers from the state of Haryana in India. Factor analysis suggested that two variables represent procedural justice: one focused on the perceived fairness of procedures for evaluation and the other focused on the perceived fairness of the procedures for promotion decisions. Only one factor was needed for distributive justice. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis indicated that all three justice variables had significant positive associations with life satisfaction. The results suggest that enhancing distributive and procedural justice views of officers should increase the level of reported satisfaction with life.

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Data Availability

Data is available by contacting Dr. Qureshi.

Notes

  1. Distributive and procedural justice were the two originally proposed dimensions. Informational justice and interpersonal justice are two other dimensions that were proposed later; the former focuses on explanations being made for procedural and distributive justice decisions and the latter on being treated with dignity and respect by the organization (Colquitt & Greenberg, 2005).

  2. The original plan was to have a single measure of procedural justice, but due to the factor analysis results, a variable for procedural justice promotions and a variable for procedural justice evaluations were created and tested. To determine whether the results would change, the two procedural justice variables for promotions and evaluations were combined into a single variable of procedural justice, and OLS regression was conducted with this single procedural justice measure. R2 was .19. Age, gender, distributive justice, and the combined procedural justice variables were significant predictors of life satisfaction. Age, distributive justice, and procedural justice had positive associations with life satisfaction. Female officers reported in general higher satisfaction with life as compared to male officers. In terms of amount of variance explained and significant predictors, the results were the same between using two measures of procedural justice or one combined measure of procedural justice.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Reviewers, Editor, and Editorial staff for reviewing the paper and their comments. These comments improved the paper. We thank Janet Lambert for proofreading the paper.

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  1. School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Dunes Medical/Professional Building, Room 2101, Indiana University Northwest, 3400 Broadway, Gary, IN, 46408, USA

    Eric G. Lambert

  2. Inspector General of Police, Recruits Training College, Bhondsi, Gurgaon, Haryana, 122011, India

    Hanif Qureshi

  3. School of Criminal Justice, 665C Dyer Hall, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    James Frank

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Lambert, E.G., Qureshi, H. & Frank, J. Justice and Life Satisfaction Among Indian Police Officers: A Preliminary Study. Asian J Criminol 18, 353–369 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-023-09408-8

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