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Many, if not all, professions place a high value on ethical conduct. Professionals working in organisations that are perceived to have a low regard for ethics should therefore experience occupational‐organisational conflict leading to lower organisational commitment. The purpose of the paper is to examine the relationship between police officers' perceptions of their organisation's commitment to ethics, and their affective commitment to that organisation and their occupation.

Data from a recent survey (2005) of frontline police officers in Western Australia are analysed (n=1,837). Analysis of the gender, age, years in the organisation and other demographics show the sample of respondents is representative of the total workforce of frontline officers. The moderating role of tenure is examined for officers with two to ten years (n=697), 11‐20 years (n=687), and more than 20 years (n=453) using multi‐sample analysis.

Perceptions of officers early in their career about their organisation's commitment to ethics is more important to their commitment to their occupation than for officers with more than ten years' tenure. Perceptions of officers about their organisation's regard for ethics in the middle stage of their careers were found to impact relatively weakly on their commitment to their organisation compared with officers earlier or later in their career.

The study suggests that leaders and managers in policing organisations should pay particular attention to the perceptions early career officers develop regarding ethics if they want to strengthen occupational and organisational commitment and increase the likelihood they will remain in working in the profession.

The paper shows that police work demands that a strong climate for ethics exists within policing organisations. The importance to officers' sense of identification with their profession and commitment to their organisation at different stages of their career has received limited attention despite the implications for leadership and management practices.

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.

Concerned with the pervasive unfriendly relationship between the Nigeria police and the public, and the need to improve upon this relationship, the present study was designed to examine the moderating roles of perceived organizational support and public recognition in the relationship between unethical attitudes and prosocial behaviour among a sample of Nigeria police officers.

Using a cross‐sectional survey design, data was collected from a total of 163 participants randomly drawn among officers and men of the Nigeria Police Force, Oyo State Command, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses reveal an inverse relationship between unethical attitudes and prosocial behaviour among police officers with high or average levels of perceived organizational support and public recognition, while among police officers with low perceived organizational support and public recognition there was a positive relationship between unethical attitudes and prosocial behaviour. The concepts of social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity were used to explain these findings.

Statements on causality with respect to the present findings must be made with caution because of the non‐experimental nature of the study. Furthermore, perceived organizational support and public recognition were used as global concepts; future studies could explore different facets of these constructs and see how they moderate the relationship between unethical attitudes and prosocial behaviour.

The results of the study suggest that the Nigerian police must be supported and accorded their due recognition if they must behave ethically and prosocially to the Nigerian public.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the causes of police corruption in Taiwan and identify those factors which can enhance the status of police.

A literature review and eight in-depth interviews of informants are employed to support the arguments of environment, education, governance and culture and to formulate a typology of police corruption in Taiwan.

The literature review and eight interviews confirm that individual cases of police corruption have replaced systemic police corruption in Taiwan. The author concludes that police corruption should be addressed in the context of both environment and institutional design. Even though the public perceptions of police integrity in Taiwan have been trending positively over the years, the individual cases of police corruption which occur within certain precincts indicate the continued importance of initiating institutional reforms. The public perceptions of Taiwan’s police force will be further improved if police corruption can be minimized and properly controlled.

This paper can serve as a benchmark to evaluate future development of Taiwan police corruption.

This paper provides an analysis of the causes of police corruption in Taiwan and the measures taken to curb it.

Relying on a moral development theoretical framework, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the perceived seriousness of a particular behavior is a reflection of one’s broader attitudes toward ethical behaviors. Attitudes toward ethical behavior should provide both an elaborated explanation for the relationship between the perceived seriousness of a behavior and the likelihood of reporting a fellow officer for that behavior, as well as an alternative approach to the measurement and assessment of police integrity outcomes.

Using data from a sample of 499 Philadelphia police officers, the current study uses a modified fifteen item ethics scale first developed by Hyams (1990) and used by others, in order to examine its relation to integrity outcomes. The paper provides a full descriptive and measurement analysis of the scale and then explores its utility in understanding integrity outcomes through a variety of hypothetical scenarios.

While the perceived seriousness of a behavior is strongly predictive of the likelihood of reporting a fellow officer who engages in that behavior, the findings suggest that seriousness may be a proxy for attitudes toward ethical behaviors.

While Klockars et al.’s approach to the measurement of police integrity has been an important contribution to integrity research, other measures of police integrity such as attitudes toward ethical behavior are also useful as they move us conceptually from assessing attitudes toward ethical behavior to their antecedents – the strength of underlying value premises shaping subsequent attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between three aspects of leadership – role modeling, strictness, and openness – and nine types of integrity violations within the Dutch police force.

In this paper data were collected by means of a questionnaire from five regional police organizations in The Netherlands (2,130 questionnaires to regular police officers, response rate 51 percent). Respondents were requested to describe their direct supervisor's leadership qualities and the frequency of integrity violations in their unit. Multivariate analysis techniques were employed to test the relation between the three leadership styles and the nine types of integrity violations.

The paper finds that role modeling, strictness, and openness of leaders influence the behavior of police officers, but the impact of the variables on the different types of integrity violations varies. Role modeling is especially significant in limiting unethical conduct in the context of interpersonal relationships. Employees appear to copy the leader's integrity standards in their daily interaction with one another. Strictness is important as well, but appears to be particularly effective in controlling fraud, corruption and the misuse of resources. The impact of openness is less evident.

The study in this paper has taken the field of leadership and ethics a step forward by relating different aspects of leadership with different types of violations. The results are significant for further development of theories on ethics and leadership. Future research should combine different sources and methods in order to further test the findings.

The results in this paper have implications for integrity policies and leadership training. A multifaceted leadership strategy will be most effective in safeguarding and improving the integrity of (police) organizations.

The paper shows that leadership is the most frequently cited organizational factor in discussions about the safeguarding of ethics and integrity. However, empirical data are lacking regarding the extent to which different aspects of leadership individually contribute to different kinds of integrity violations.

This study aims examine to what extent four variable categories of individual ethical ideology, organizational ethical culture, superior's ethical quality and job satisfaction (JS) are causally linked to personal (un)ethical behaviors among South Korean police officers.

With a stratified sampling technique, 687 surveys were collected from 16 major local police headquarters across the nation. The reliability and validity of the variables were checked. The structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypotheses.

Idealism, principlism, utilitarianism and JS have a negative influence on unethical behaviors, whereas superior's unethical standards are positively associated with unethical behaviors.

The findings can be applied as a reference to improve ethical framework to promote behaviors by enriching the higher level of personal ethical ideology, superior's ethical quality and principlism and utilitarianism by adding an ethics training course to the continuing education program for all officers and developing further education programs for police leadership to raise ethical awareness and quality.

To the authors' knowledge, the study is among the first studies with four comprehensive categories of relevant variables and adds understanding to (un)ethical behaviors of police officers.

Although workplace learning is an important part of professional learning, little is known about the unethical aspects of workplace learning. This study aims to describe students’ learning experiences from in-field training in the police. This paper aims to examine how workplace learning can challenge proper ethical professional development and thus become a question of ethical concern.

The study is based on open-ended questions in a questionnaire among Norwegian police students (N = 277) who had ended their one year’s in-field training and had returned to campus for the third and final year of police education. The data are analysed by means of a qualitative content analysis.

The paper presents two findings. First, the students learn best from assignments that push them beyond their comfort zone. Second, students struggle with their own expectations of themselves as police officers. The findings suggest that workplace learning leaves students aspiring to demonstrate their capability to be a police officer, rather than focusing on learning to be a police officer.

The study can provide organisations such as educations, public services and businesses with better understanding on how to enrich learning in their on-the-job training manuals and programmes to evolve ethical professional behaviour. Ethical considerations can help leadership to improve efficiency and performance at the workplace.

How the potentially unethical aspects of workplace learning can influence the profession’s ethical attitude is an understudied topic in studies on learning to become a professional.

The purpose of this paper is to examine supervisor perceptions of police integrity situations using the measurement of police integrity instrument. Additional survey questions focused on aspects of integrity of particular relevance within the study agency. The latter concerned that agency's on‐going legal arrangement with the federal government to address alleged sub‐standard patterns and practices of officer/agency performance.

In total, 478 sergeants and lieutenants from the study agency completed the survey instrument. This represented 97 percent of those asked to complete the instrument and approximately 60 percent of first‐line supervisors.

The results paralleled some aspects found in prior research, in particular that respondents cast themselves as having stronger integrity than their peers. Findings also illustrated potential weaknesses in efforts to enhance police integrity in light of federal intervention in the study agency.

The findings represented the first focused effort to replicate the measurement of police integrity instrument among first‐line supervisors. Such personnel were key figures in efforts to modify deficient patterns and practices, making them a prime focus for research consideration.

The skepticisms expressed by some supervisors illustrated issues worthy of consideration in future efforts to enhance integrity in police organizations. First‐line supervisors play key roles in shaping officer conduct, particularly in larger agencies. As such, more consideration needs to be given to the role they play in organizational change efforts.

In addition to informing scholarly understanding through the measurement of police integrity instrument, the findings are of importance in applied efforts to enhance integrity or otherwise modify police organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contextual differences and causes of police corruption in Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan and to assess their governments’ effectiveness in minimising this problem.

The paper begins by identifying the contextual differences in the five countries before analysing their major causes of police corruption and their governments’ effectiveness in minimising it.

Police corruption is a more serious problem in Indonesia and the Philippines because of their more difficult governance environments, low salaries of police officers, red tape, lack of meritocracy in recruitment and promotion, and lack of accountability of police officers. By contrast, the perceived extent of police corruption has declined in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in recent years because of the improvement in the salaries of their police officers and the implementation of various police reforms.

This comparative analysis of combating police corruption in five Asian countries will be of interest to policy makers and scholars concerned with minimising this problem.