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Police Stressors, Job Satisfaction, Burnout, and Turnover Intention Among South Korean Police Officers

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Abstract

There have been a number of studies of the effect of stress on police turnover indicating that stress encourages resignation. Unfortunately, stress can be an unavoidable aspect of policing and simply identifying the relationship does not help us avoid turnover. This study not only examines the association between various job stressors and turnover but also assesses whether the relationship is mediated by job satisfaction and burnout. If these factors reduce the effects of stress on turnover, then police administrators can work to influence these mediators and thereby reduce the negative effects of stress. Building on the previous literature on employee turnover, we explored the associations of stressors, job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intent using survey data from South Korean line officers. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and structural equation modeling were conducted. Among a range of police stressors, work-family conflict emerged as a significant predictor of turnover. Burnout mediated the association between the stressor and turnover intent, while job satisfaction did not. Possible policies were discussed to address the issue of work-family conflict and to reduce burnout and, thereby, turnover among police officers. The current South Korean study produced empirical results that are not exactly identical to the findings from western studies, which suggests the importance of the historical and cultural contexts in police research.

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Notes

  1. Although the turnover intent measure is ordinal, the number of categories is five. Given evidence that, as the number of categories increases, ordinal data behave more closely to interval data (Boomsma 1987; Rigdon 1998), this outcome variable in the present study was treated as if it was continuous.

  2. For fear of multicollinearity particularly between age and length of service, variance inflation factors and tolerance values were calculated for all statistical models. The values for both of these statistics revealed that multicollinearity was not a problem in any of the models.

  3. The standardized regression weight of 0.62 between work-family conflict and burnout means that as much as 38 % of variance in burnout can be explained by the measure of work-family conflict alone.

  4. Due to the paucity of prior research, the exact relationship between organizational commitment and burnout is not clear. Griffin et al. (2009) conjectured two possible causal paths: either increased organizational commitment would protect employees from burnout or, contrarily, it would increase the likelihood of burnout if the negative aspects of the workplace were overwhelming. Although cross-sectional, our study is in line with the first hypothesis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Police Administration, Chosun University, Gwangju, South Korea

    Ilhong Yun

  2. Department of Police Administration, Kyonggi University, Suwon, Kyonggi, South Korea

    EuiGab Hwang

  3. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 20742, USA

    James Lynch

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  1. Ilhong Yun
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  2. EuiGab Hwang
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Correspondence to EuiGab Hwang.

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Yun, I., Hwang, E. & Lynch, J. Police Stressors, Job Satisfaction, Burnout, and Turnover Intention Among South Korean Police Officers. Asian Criminology 10, 23–41 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-015-9203-4

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