CHARACTERISTIC SELF-ESTEEM, COMPETENCE, AND COPING EFFICACY IN RELATION TO POLICE OFFICER PERFORMANCE

This study attempted to determine the self-esteem, self-coping efficacy, and self-appraised competence levels of 60 urban-city police officers and to examine the relationship between these variables and field performance with their police patrol tasks as rated by 3 supervisors. A second goal of the study was to investigate the relationship between length of police officer work experience and this same set of variables. The frequency of adaptive and maladaptive behavior among the sample population was also examined in relation to this same set of variables. The study employed four instruments: (1) A portion of the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale was used to measure self-esteem; (2) the Patrol Officer Self-Competence Rating based on the work of Dunnette and Motowidlo (1976) was used to determine the subjects\u27 self-appraised competence; (3) the Self-Coping Inventory, based on the work of Zeitlin (1980) was used to determine the subjects\u27 self-coping efficacy; and (4) the Police Supervisors\u27 Field Performance Rating Form based on the work of Dunnette and Motowidlo (1976) was used to determine the supervisors\u27 rating of police officer performance. Police officer job performance was not related significantly to: (1) characteristic self-esteem; (2) self-appraised job performance; and (3) self-coping efficacy Averaged supervisors\u27 ratings of officer job performance were not significantly related to Productive Self-Coping, Active Self-Coping, or Flexible Self-Coping. However, when the coping measures were correlated with the overall job performance evaluations of the three individual supervisors (as opposed to averaging the ratings assigned by supervisors to each officer), significant relationships were obtained for two of the three supervisors. This suggests that officer job performance may be related to self-coping, but that measurement problems may have obscured this relationship. Implications for future research included a comparative study of officers with high and low measured levels of self esteem; a study including observation to supplement self-measures utilizing more detailed rating categories; and a study of other correlates of performance identified by comparative studies with other hazardous occupations