Law enforcement officers live in their community’s crises. Their existence while at work necessitates resolving the highs and lows of other people’s lives, then resuming what most would consider normal when off duty. To cope with this balance, a healthy officer needs to have resiliency. Although there has been a continuing debate about the best ways to measure and foster resilience, there is a consensus around the notion that resilience is the ability to effectively and calmly master and transcend adverse circumstances and devastating losses.1 Such rebounding and thriving experiences then contribute to the tool kits for people to use when they encounter future challenges, including both major traumatic events and minor everyday stressors.
But the difficulty of developing the ability to bounce back to normalcy or better still, “bounce forward” after being subjected to repeated physical and psychological trauma has historically been under-emphasized, and perhaps unrecognized, in the police profession.2 Law enforcement organizations need to prioritize officer wellness by institutionalizing best practices and partnering with academia (academic advisory council, doctoral internships, etc.) to better understand what the research reveals about officers’ health and resilience.
Recently, there appears to be a broadened focus on research and initiatives related to the mental well-being of officers. This comes at a time when the public’s access to and scrutiny of officers’ actions seem to be at an all-time high. This concern, combined with what are often considered by law enforcement as unreasonable performance expectations during critical incidents, is causing significant stress to those in the profession. A person who is subjected to continuous stress has a reduced ability to regulate emotions and behaviors.3 One study found 34 percent of law enforcement officers demonstrated partial PTSD, that is, a person who has sufficient symptoms of PTSD to cause impairment.4 Officers who have impaired decision-making abilities can pose significant risks of injury or death to themselves, other officers, and civilians, as well as increased litigation risks for their agencies. Officers need to maximize psychological and physiological control during critical incidents (and recovery afterward). By creating an organizational culture that embraces mental preparedness and provides the tools for stress reduction, an organization can help to develop and maintain resilience within its ranks.5
The evidence demonstrating the importance of resilient employees in law enforcement agencies is substantial. Consider that 144 law enforcement officers were tragically killed in the line of duty in 2018. Now consider that, during the same time frame, at least 159 law enforcement officers committed suicide.6 Frustrations from police work and the public scrutiny can create seemingly insurmountable obstacles for officers. Resilience includes a self-awareness that allows a person to know when to reach out for help.
A recent Pew Center report provides some evidence of the emotional angst among officers when engaging in work that can have a negative effect on their personal and collective wellness. The results of this study are telling. Among the concerns voiced were frustration with work satisfaction (51 percent), a belief that the public does not understand the daily risks inherent in police work (86 percent), unfair internal discipline processes (53 percent), feeling as though they are understaffed (72 percent), and a feeling of increased callousnes.7 Research regarding officer wellness can provide agencies insight on the needs of their employees and offer direction in addressing these unmet needs.
Many law enforcement agencies have classes in place designed to address the well-being of their officers, and classes and workshops can be a helpful part of a larger strategy to address employees’ needs. However, by examining available research related to organizational resiliency, law enforcement leaders are much better positioned to make strategic and informed decisions that forge a lasting culture change to improve the health of their employees and, indirectly, their relationships with the civilian community. On a related note, as recruitment and retention challenges are at the forefront of many conversations in the policing profession, providing an organizational climate conducive to building resilience offers, in part, a solution to the personnel shortage faced by many law enforcement leaders by increasing officer retention.
There is a large body of scholarly research on the environmental, physiological, evolutionary, and psychological factors leading to and arising from resilience.8 Evidence suggests that much of people’s ability to rebound, and even thrive, relies on their social relationships.9 This would indicate that the police organizational subculture (and the relationships within) plays a significant role in providing the ingredients for a sustainable, healthy workplace for individual employees. Consider the bonds that are built within patrol teams and special units who train and operate under difficult circumstances, face challenging and traumatic events in the field, and forge strong connections by going through such experiences together. Law enforcement agencies are fertile ground for challenging experiences and, consequently, opportunities to thrive. Furthermore, becoming a member of an organization and learning about its norms and expectations has a direct influence on the commitment, turnover, satisfaction, and performance of an organization’s employees.10 Such evidence suggests that the norms of communication within an organization play a vital role in how employees perceive their place in their organization and at what level they accept (and prioritize) their organizational membership.
Resilience as the Mortar for a Police Organizational Subculture
Resilience has been studied internationally and across the academic disciplines and been invoked across a wide array of tribulations and traumas, including surviving from and dealing with natural disasters, wars and violence, career setbacks, financial turmoil, family conflicts, bereavement, and so on.11 While some scholars have looked at resilience as an inherently personal trait or one that can be acquired during socialization, there is a significant body of work understanding resilience as more of a developing, management process. Law enforcement benefits most from collective resilience, whereby communities (such as law enforcement organizations, networks, and institutions) come together to create and sustain a culture of resilience. Culture is the establishment of a commonly held set of work and life practices or policies and agreed norms, beliefs, and values that are communicated and demonstrated within the group and to relevant other groups. In essence, culture is both learned and shared. In this sense, resilience becomes an integral, systemic ingredient in a group’s way of thinking and operating in stressful, risky, and threatening situations, such as those experienced in policing. Leaders are well positioned to establish a management process that provides a strategic platform that emphasizes resilience in their organizational subculture. A need exists for law enforcement leaders and executive staff to communicate and demonstrate their commitment to the well-being of their employees.
Not surprisingly, research has shown an array of personal and collective benefits for maintaining a culture of resilience, which can lead to a healthy police organization and employee retention. Significant outcomes include
n a sense of organizational pride;
n a feeling of inclusiveness;
n an increase in psychological and relational health and organizational satisfaction;
n an increase in personal self-esteem and an innate ability to achieve goals; and
n an enhanced sense of personal control having overcome negative and sometimes volatile emotions (e.g., consider an officer’s emotional state during the use of force).12
Major Contributors to Resilience
By embracing department-wide initiatives, police organizations can build and maintain a collective resilience that can lead to many team characteristics sought by police leadership. Major factors that have been found to be associated with collective resilience are the following:
n Credible leaders who openly and decisively communicate models of resilience that highlight valued interdependence (line-level officers and command staff; police and civilian community)
n An organizational perspective that most challenges faced by law enforcement are not insurmountable, while acknowledging that some aspects of them may be unchangeable (confident and competent leadership)
n Promoting the design of successive workable, yet flexible goals and plans to cope with demanding situations (structures in place allowing flexibility to meet the demands of the job), cognitively restructuring them as conquerable, and doing so primarily with positive emotions (e.g., commending courageous performance, educational debriefs)
n Leadership and line-level personnel crafting shared understanding and working together on impactful initiatives (e.g., the practice of internal procedural justice)
n Peers and leaders providing and encouraging mutual support and protection for and with each other13
The above enabling factors—structural, communicative, and psychological—are interrelated. They function optimally as a package and work most effectively where mindfulness and awareness need to be ongoing priorities.14 The social byproducts of resilience and the enabling factors that drive them are not mutually exclusive. They provide feedback in mutually influential ways.
The Role of Intergroup Communication in Resilience
Intergroup theories pertaining to leadership underscore the notion that people look to their leaders to reduce any uncertainties (e.g., among older, conventionally oriented officers) about who they are as members of their groups.15 In this sense, they turn to, and have a preference for, trustworthy leaders who communicate a clear, unambiguously affirmative message about their group identity. In order to forge a healthy and steadfast culture of resiliency, this message has to be conveyed to the rank and file from the top.
Communication such as this works to mitigate the “us-versus-them” mentality that often causes anxiety and dismay between line-level officers and command staff, which is adverse to a healthy and resilient organizational culture. In this sense, much of the internal conflict between police command staff and line-level officers can also be explored (and mitigated) within the intergroup context.
Practices are being used today that, according to the research (and attested to by participants), will provide some of the components necessary to enhance organizational health and officer resilience. Agencies can review the evidence provided as a result of these partnerships and make them actionable within their own organizations. Just as a program will not lead an agency to achieve community policing, a class designed as a complementary strategy for enhancing resilience, will not create substantive culture change within an organization. Success in organizational resiliency will favor those agencies that embrace officer wellness as a cultural mandate and invest in it as such. The following are two examples of robust resilience initiatives.
VALOR Initiative
The International Association of Chiefs of Police has partnered with the University of Pennsylvania and the Bureau of Justice Assistance VALOR initiative to create a law enforcement agency and officer resilience training program. This empirical program was designed based on the Penn Resilience Program, which was developed by the Penn Positive Psychology Center. The VALOR program is a customized police officer program focused on enhancing officer and agency resilience skills. Specifically, VALOR aims to equip officers with a skill set that can be immediately applied to everyday life to strengthen one’s ability to overcome adversity and challenges, manage stress, maintain peak performance, and thrive in one’s personal and professional life.16
PRO Training
The San Antonio Police Department (Texas) introduces wellness into its culture with performance and recovery optimization (PRO) training.17 Through the agency’s Psychological Services Unit, PRO is a wellness program based on research (and the U.S. Air Force Warrior Resiliency Program) that offers a variety of modules including optimal responses for officers in performance and stress management, nutrition, fitness, and critical incident response. The PRO training program and VALOR are integrated into the entire department and supported by the leadership, which is important for successfully addressing the need for organizational cultural resilience.
In addition to VALOR and PRO training, there are other practices, programs, and initiatives that fall under the category of organizationally designed stress reduction efforts, including the following:
n Peer support programs with trusted confidentiality
n Department fitness programs and proactive health screening
n Complaint mediation
n Discipline policies that incorporate non-punitive early intervention
n Robust training programs, to include debriefs
n Consistent communication between management and line-level employees
n Internal collaboration regarding significant changes
n Chaplain programs18
Conclusion
Cultural norms are learned, and organizational leadership plays a significant role in communicating and modeling behaviors that form an organization’s culture. By mining the cross-disciplinary academic literature on interpersonal and collective resilience, law enforcement leadership can better explore ways in which management (and line-level officers) can create strategies to build and sustain a culture of resilience. Processes of intergroup communication are also fundamental to understanding the dynamics involved and impact the ways in which resilience can bolster law enforcement personnel’s individual and community wellness. Furthermore, developing a repertoire for and encouraging practices relevant to resilient communication can benefit policing, in part, by crafting the necessary breathing room to reduce intergroup tensions, both within an agency and between different community entities. d
Notes:
1Marc A. Zimmerman, “Resiliency Theory: A Strengths-based Approach to Research and Practice for Adolescent Health,” Health Education and Behavior 40 (2013): 381–383.
2Siambabala B. Manyena et al., “Disaster Resilience: A Bounce Back or Bounce Forward Ability?” Local Environment 16 (2011): 417–424; See, however, Carrie Steiner, “Emotional Tools to Build Officer Resiliency,” In Public Safety (August 2018).
3 Bengt B. Arnetz et al., “Trauma Resilience Training for Police: Psychophysiological and Performance Effects,” Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology 24 (2009): 1–9.
4 Ingrid V.E. Carlier, Regina D. Lamberts, and Bernhold P.R. Gersons, “Risk Factors for Posttraumatic Stress Symptomatology in Police Officers: A Prospective Analysis,” Journal of Nervous Mental Disease 185 (1997): 498–506.
5Judith P. Andersen et al., “Mental Preparedness as a Pathway to Police Resilience and Optimal Functioning in the Line of Duty,” International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience 17 (2015): 624–627.
6 Blue H.E.L.P., “159 American Police Officers Died by Suicide in 2018,” December 31, 2018.
7Rich Morin, Kim Parker, Renee Stepler, and Andrew Mercer, Behind the Badge: Amid Protests and Calls for Reform, How Police View Their Jobs, Key Issues and Recent Fatal Encounters Between Blacks and Police (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, January 11, 2017).
8 Ian de Terte and Christine Stephens, “Psychological Resilience of Workers in High-Risk Organizations,” Stress and Health 30 (2014): 353-355; Ivan Robertson et al., “Resilience Training in the Workplace from 2003–2014: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 88 (2015): 533–562.
9 Tamara D. Afifi, “Individual/Relational Resilience,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46 (2018): 5–9; Charles S. Carver, “Resilience and Thriving: Issues, Models, and Linkages,” Journal of Social Issues 54 (1998): 245–266; Virginia E. O’Leary and Jeanette R. Ickovics, “Resilience and Thriving in Response to Challenge: An Opportunity for a Paradigm Shift in Women’s Health,” Women’s Health: Research on Gender, Behavior, and Policy 1, no. 2 (1995): 121–142.
10 DaJung Woo and Karen Myers, “Organizational Socialization and Intergroup Dynamics,” in Advances in Intergroup Communication, Howard Giles and Anne Maass, eds. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 227–245.
11 George S. Everly, “Building a Resilient Organizational Culture,” Harvard Business Review (2011).
12 American Psychological Association, “The Road to Resilience”; Patricia M. Buzzanell and John B. Houston, eds., Special Issue: “Communication and Resilience: Multilevel Applications and Insights,” Journal of Applied Communication 46 (2018): 1–4.
13 Woo and Myers, “Organizational Socialization and Intergroup Dynamics.”
14 Michael S. Christopher et al., “Mindfulness-based Resilience Training to Reduce Health Risk, Stress Reactivity, and Aggression among Law Enforcement Officers: A Feasibility and Preliminary Efficacy Trial,” Psychiatry Research (2018): 104–114; Steven Stanley, “Mindfulness: Towards a Critical Relational Perspective,” Personality and Social Psychology Compass 6, no. 9 (2012): 631–641.
15 Bert Hayslip Jr. and Gregory Smith, eds., Special Issue: “Emerging Perspectives on Resilience in Adulthood and Later Life,” Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics 32 (New York: Springer, 2012); Michael A. Hogg, “Self-Uncertainty, Leadership Preference, and Communication of Social Identity,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 26 (2018): 111–121.
16 Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, “VALOR Initiative.”
17 Elizabeth Simpson, “Performance and Recovery Optimization (PRO) in the San Antonio Police Department,” Community Policing Dispatch 10, no. 12 (2017).
18 Howard P. Greenwald and Charlie Beck, “Bringing Sides Together: Community-Based Complaint Mediation,” Police Chief 85, no. 8 (August 2018): 36–42; Larry Mallak, “Putting Organizational Resilience to Work,” Industrial Magazine 40, no.6 (November/December 1998).
Please cite as
Shawn Hill and Howie Giles, “Resilience as a Department Cultural Initiative,” Police Chief online, May 29, 2019.
