Managing police officers: Are the present management practices ideal for promoting high engagement?

This paper uses a Conservation of Resources (COR) model to examine how motivation within the Ability, Motivation and Opportunity (AMO) model affects the wellbeing -performance continuum for police officers in the UK and Italy. In particular, COR is used to compare how Perceived Organizational Support (POS) affects organizational stress, employees’ resilience, and engagement. Structural Equation Modeling was used to analyse data from 220 Italian police and 228 UK police officers. The findings show that low Perceived Organizational Support (POS) leads to high stress, which then comprises employees’ resilience, and demotivates them from being engaged on the job, explaining approximately half of their engagement. The contribution of this paper is that it explained how stress and resilience mediates the relationship between POS and engagement. COR theory explains that when POS is low, employees perceive a resource loss spiral which compromises their wellbeing, and consequently police officers’ engagement is low.