Does Organizational Culture Influence Police Integrity? A Scoping Review

Abstract

This scoping review paper aimed to review the different studies about organizational culture of police and its impact towards level of police integrity. The systematic search was conducted through a reputable electronic database of Web of Science, Scopus and ScienceDirect and limited to inclusion criteria such as publication years, sample, research focus, participants and language. The purpose of this review is based on two research objectives; to determine the relationship between organizational culture and integrity of police and to identify determinants of organizational culture that affect police integrity. The methodology of this review was based on the Arksley and O’Malley framework of the scoping review. The process of identification of papers, eliminating duplicates of works and selecting papers based on inclusion and exclusion to chart the key findings has been repeatedly reviewed to ensure the authenticity of the results. The findings from the literature and theoretical review indicated that determinants found such as ethics training, peers’ willingness to report, socialization and disciplinary actions significantly influence police integrity. It is evidently clear from the findings that, growing interest of scholars to investigate the organizational factors of police integrity will derive more antecedents that contribute to the integrity particularly in organizational level. Future research should be undertaken in Asia countries since the majority of studies focus on western policing and the result could not be generalized.

Keywords: Integrity, police, police culture, organizational culture

Introduction

Integrity is an issue that has received a lot of attention around the world. It has become a prominent topic in terms of preserving an organization's reputation. Integrity is also seen as an indicator for trust, competence, professionalism, and confidence (Akir & Malie, 2012). Integrity defines the agreement of actions with relevant moral values, standards, norms and rules, and it involves ethics and workplace environment systems based on established standards of values and behaviour to be followed by members in the organization (Arifin & Ahmad, 2016). In other words, it is “the quality of action in line with applicable moral principles, convention, and rules,” and it can be a personal or organizational attribute (Lasthuizen et al., 2011, p. 387). According to Klockars et al. (2006) loyalty, courage, virtue, honesty, prudence, trust, elimination of self-interest, intellectual honesty, moral justice, principled conduct, responsibility and dedication to mission are among the good hallmarks of good integrity.

Integrity and accountability are essential to public confidence in law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement agencies will be known as the agency in charge of protecting citizens and ensuring a safe environment. Michael et al. (2006), describe law enforcement integrity as fidelity or firm adherence to a code of values or principles: a set of moral standards that facilitate the mission of law enforcement agencies in modern democratic societies. In broad terms, that mission entails enforcing the law, maintaining public order, and providing community service in a manner that is consistent with both the letter and spirit of all citizens' constitutional rights (Michael et al., 2006). Traditionally, police agencies garnered much attention in discussions about integrity because of its central role as an instrument of government to guarantee the well-being and security of the country. Despite their critical position, they are subjected to public criticism for poor behaviour such as excessive force, violence, drug abuse, corruption, and general misconduct on and off the work (Kääriäinen et al., 2016). This will erode public trust and have an impact on the organization's image and government governance. To measure the governance quality, police agencies play a vital function to curb malpractice of its officers due to the centrality of the rule of law and enforcement (Rose-Ackerman & Palifka, 2016).

The public’s perception of the police is fundamentally shaped by police integrity (Hickman et al., 2004). As policing gives one the chance to operate with little oversight from others and having a substantial level of decision-making flexibility, it is argued that the police profession is the one that frequently leads to numerous ethical and moral complications (Khalid & Saad, 2021). In the police profession, the utmost challenge is to uphold the rule of law in order to establish legitimacy as police are formal social control agents. The interest on police integrity has been studied by prominent scholars of policing pioneered by Herman Goldstein in 1975, and expanded by Carls Klockars, Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic, and Maria Habberfeld since the 1990s. These scholars have defined police integrity, developed a measurement of integrity to see the contours of integrity and undertaken various research in comparing the culture of integrity in different police agencies as well as measuring the strength of police culture of integrity cross-national. This scoping review seeks to review different studies related to the notion of organizational culture and police integrity.

Problem Statement

Abuse of integrity by police agencies has been a major concern among the police community, general public as well as the academic community globally (Lim, 2019; Peacock et al., 2020). Society is increasingly aware and understands the importance of integrity, especially in curbing corruption and abuse of power in the delivery of services. The growing frequency of public complaints as a reflection of police agencies' declining the importance of integrity. In Malaysia, statistics indicate that there have been numerous public complaints concerning police misconduct (Ayub & Wahab, 2022). From 2011 and 2020 the number of public complaints against police misconduct achieved an all-time high of 3443 complaints and the figures have risen year by year (Jen, 2022). In between January until May 2022, the public has formally complained about 208 instances of police misconduct. Surprisingly, a significant difference is seen in the second highest number of complaints, which is only 11 complaints to the Immigration Department of Malaysia. Past research on the value of integrity pointed to institutional contexts as a primary contributor to integrity violations (Lim, 2019; Nalla et al., 2018; Thompson et al., 2020). Therefore, this scoping review paper is conducted to identify the organizational culture of police impact the level of police integrity and what are the factors of organizational culture or police culture that influence integrity of police.

Research Questions

Research questions are the doubts or disputable ideas that transpire to a researcher and provide the motivation to initiate a study to find solutions in order to clarify uncertainties. Accordingly, this paper is to query the factors of organizational culture of police that influence the level of integrity in police personnel. The research questions for this review are:

RQ 1: “Does organizational culture of police impact the level of police integrity”?

RQ2: “What are the determinants of organizational culture of police that lead to police integrity”?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is based on the research questions above to investigate the relationship of organizational culture of police towards integrity of police. This study also seeks to obtain data which helps to identify the factors of organizational culture that influence integrity of police. Based on the purpose of this study, this review will identify the knowledge gaps in an area pertaining to the phenomenal study of integrity in qualitative and quantitative research.

Research Methods

Scoping review

Scoping review aims to identify available evidence in a given field, to clarify the concept or definitions in the literature, to examine how research is conducted and to identify key characteristics or factors related to the concept. Other than that, scoping review is also used as a precursor to a systematic review and in identifying research gaps. According to Munn et al. (2018), scoping reviews are an ideal tool to determine the scope or coverage of a body of literature on a given topic and give clear indication of the volume of literature and studies available as well as overview (broad or detailed) of its focus. Meanwhile, systematic review is undertaken to confirm or refute whether or not current practice is based on relevant evidence, to establish quality to that evidence, and to address uncertainty or variation in practice that might occur due to the conflicting evidence.

This paper was conducted based on the framework for scoping review by Arksey and O’Malley, (2002) focusing on the studies conducted within the past eight years (2018-2022) which cover broader issues in organizational culture of police and police integrity. The methodological framework for this scoping review is illustrated in figure 1.

Developing research questions

This study intends to investigate the existing evidence on organizational culture and how it affects the degree of police integrity. The objectives of this scoping review are to discover and summarizes the information about the association between police organizational culture and integrity. A guiding research question for this review were; “Does the organizational culture of the police have an effect on the degree of police integrity?” and “What are the aspects of the organizational culture of the police that lead to police integrity?”

Identification of relevant studies

To answer the main research questions for this particular scoping review, authors identify the most appropriate search terms that included: “organizational culture,” “police culture”, and “integrity”. Based on search terms, authors downloaded research papers from reputable electronic databases like Scopus, Web of Science and ScienceDirect; only papers published within the last 5 years were included in the search criteria (2018-2022).

Selection of studies for review

The process of selecting a study to review includes a few criteria. The study should be published between 2018 to 2022 in order to identify the most recent trends and patterns in the targeted topic. Selected study also should be full access and using English language (see Table 1).

Charting key information

The information collected from the included studies were presented according to qualitative or quantitative research. Each study went through a thorough reading process to glean crucial factors or elements connected to the research questions.

Summarizing and reporting the result

In the process of compiling the findings of this paper, the authors carefully and frequently reviewed the various extracted findings to identify and eliminate any similar traits or factors to improve the authenticity of the findings.

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Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Types of participants

The review of this study examined a study that focused on police no other than law enforcement bodies.

Research focus

The main concept focused by the researchers were “integrity” or “police integrity” with the outcomes relating to determinants of organizational culture or police culture in the police institutions.

Study design

The sources used for this review included research papers in qualitative and quantitative studies.

Searching strategy

Researchers used four databases to search for relevant studies namely Scopus, Web of Science and ScienceDirect. The keywords used to search for relevant studies are “integrity”, “police integrity”, “organizational culture” and “police culture”. The search was limited to full-text access papers published between the year 2018 to 2022. Table 1summarise the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this review.

Selection and extraction

Across the three databases, a total of 89 abstracts were obtained. In the process of identifying the duplication, 68 abstracts remained. Titles “organizational culture”, “police culture” and “integrity” were screened for relevance and 38 pieces were excluded due to the insignificance of research questions and leaving 30 pieces of literature for further review. Among this literature, only 23 pieces were available to be full-accessed. When inclusion and exclusion criteria (year, language, participants, study design and language) were applied, 13 pieces were removed due to the mismatching of criteria. The remaining 10 pieces were left to go through thorough reading in order to identify factors of organizational culture and police culture that influence police integrity. The scoping review process is shown in Figure 2.

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Findings

The findings of this scoping review enabled researchers to achieve the study objective, which included determining the relationship between police organizational culture and level of integrity and investigating the organizational culture's determinants of integrity. Three recent research papers were published in 2022, while one of the 10 featured papers was reported to be published in 2019. There were two qualitative studies discovered, while the remaining eight studies are quantitative. Prior to the analysis, only one study included a sample of police recruiters, while the majority of samples were constituted of police officers. Finally, it is apparent (see Table 2) that individual and organizational factors form the two levels of the determinants identified for these analyses.

Conclusion

Overall, this scoping analysis significantly contributes to the ongoing debate on police integrity and its impacts. This study opens up opportunities for future research, particularly in the area of integrity of law enforcement bodies. This paper sheds light to future researchers to further investigate various antecedents that affect integrity specifically at the organization level. Furthermore, as the majority of studies focus on western environment and the result could not be generalized, future research might examine more samples from Asia countries. Interestingly, the literature on integrity has highlighted several common findings on the determinants of integrity such as ethics training, peers’ willingness to report, socialization and disciplinary actions. Future research could take these variables into account and explore new theoretical findings.

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