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Leadership is considered to be a crucial situational factor in predicting and explaining employee deviance. The purpose of this paper therefore is to investigate the relationship between servant leadership on the one hand and employee deviance on the other. While previous studies on the impact of servant leadership on employee deviance typically aggregated all its dimensions into a single scale, this study also explores the impact of the various dimensions of servant leadership separately.

Data were collected via an online survey in two ministries of the Belgian Federal Government (n=3,445). The analyses were conducted using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear and negative binomial regression analysis.

The empirical results suggest that the generic servant leadership scale has the expected negative, protective effect on both self-reported and observer-reported employee deviance. As for the dimensions, the authors found that only the “putting subordinates first” dimension had a significant negative, protective effect on both self-reported and observer-reported employee deviance. The dimensions “behaving ethically” and “emotional healing” negatively impacted only observer-reported employee deviance and the dimension “creating value for society” negatively impacted only self-reported employee deviance. Surprisingly, the dimension “empowering” had a significant positive, strengthening effect on both self-reported and observer-reported employee deviance.

While most research assesses servant leadership’s impact on desirable behaviour, this study is about its impact on employee deviance. Also unlike most previous research, this study looks not only at the overall effect of servant leadership, but also at the impact of the various dimensions of servant leadership separately.

Combining insights from the traditional literature on police culture with insights from the broader literature on organisational culture and on grid-group cultural theory (Douglas, 1970), the purpose of this paper is to introduce a new 15-dimensional framework of “organisational culture in the police” and test this framework via a survey instrument. This new conceptualisation is broader than the traditional police culture concept and allows for comparisons of the police with other organisations.

A newly developed instrument to measure the 15-dimensional framework, called the “Leuven Organisational Culture Questionnaire (LOCQ)”, was tested in 64 local police forces in Belgium (n=3,847).

The hypothesised 15-dimensional model is largely confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. Assessments of between-unit variation show that the LOCQ is sufficiently sensitive to identify differences between work units in police organisations. The authors also find that traditional police culture characteristics tend to vary slightly less between units than the other characteristics. Also, there is less variation for characteristics related to police work (e.g. law enforcement orientation and citizen orientation) than for characteristics associated with the unit level (e.g. weak supervisory support and internal solidarity) or the organisational level (e.g. rule orientation and results orientation).

This paper expands the traditional “police culture” concept to a more generic and theory-driven conceptualisation of “organisational culture in the police”. The survey instrument offers a standardised way to map and compare culture within police organisations, and to compare it with the culture of other organisations both within and outside law enforcement.

Police officers are frequently confronted with moral dilemmas in the course of their job. The authors assume new police officers need guidance, and need to be taught at the police academy how to deal with these situations. The purpose of this paper is to obtain insight into the impact of socialization on police recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills.

The study applied a longitudinal mixed methods design, using two methods. The first method was a qualitative observation of integrity training sessions at five police academies in Belgium. The second method was a quantitative survey-measurement of recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills at three points in time: the beginning of their theoretical training, before their field training and afterwards.

The analyses show differences between the police academies in their integrity training sessions. Some of these differences are reflected in different levels of knowledge of the code of ethics. As for the development pattern of recruits’ moral reasoning skills, the study found almost no differences between the academies. Perhaps this is because recruits already have relatively high scores when they start, leaving little room for improvement during the one year training program. This suggests an important role of the police selection procedure.

Previous research on socialization and police culture has focussed on recruits being socialized in a negative police culture where misconduct is learned. This is a negative interpretation of police integrity. A positive one refers to ethical decision making generally, and moral reasoning specifically. The impact of the socialization process on recruits’ moral reasoning is empirically understudied.