The role of SLBs' Discretionary Power in determining Police Officers' outcomes

Aim: This paper uses Street Level Bureaucrats (SLB) and Conservation of Resources (COR) Theories to examine how discretionary power works for police officers. There is a plethora of research identifying how SLBs use their discretionary power to ration public services when demand exceeds supply. Additionally, previous research shows the significant role of leadership on SLBs’ outcomes, such as wellbeing. This study builds on previous research to examine whether discretionary power moderates the relationship between leadership and their personnel resource - Psychological Capital (PsyCap) and whether PsyCap mediates the relationship between leadership and wellbeing. Methods: Structural Equation Modelling and multi group comparisons of survey data from Italian and English police officers. Results: The findings show that for the Italian SLBs, when discretionary power was high, the relationship between leadership and PsyCap was also high, meaning that the greater their perception of discretionary power, the more leadership positively contributed to their PsyCap, and consequently they had higher levels of PsyCap. There was no evidence of the same impact for the English police SLBs. This has a flow-on effect because PsyCap fully mediated the relationship between leadership and wellbeing for the English police SLBs and partially mediated the relationship for the Italian police officers. This means that PsyCap is the mechanism that determines the relationship between leadership and wellbeing. Implications: SLBs’ discretionary power is the lynchpin for understanding leadership impacts SLBs wellbeing, because it affects the personal resources available to police SLBs to cope with the stresses of being a SLBs. CORT explains that poor leadership negatively impacts discretionary power, which reduces SLBs’ PsyCap, in turn negatively impacting their wellbeing. Since wellbeing is the strongest predictor of performance, it seems likely that police SLBs cannot protect society and maintain law and order when their wellbeing is compromised, and therefore the present leadership behaviours compromise the sustainability of societal wellbeing.