Stress issues are a major concern for public organisations, especially in law enforcement. Organisational context is to blame for high levels of stress and low performance. Thus, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the authors aim to understand how one contextual variable – organisational stressors that emanate from the police station’s characteristics – affect organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The second research aim is to assess how promoting trust in the police station can help mitigate the negative effects of these stressors. Based on the job demands – resources framework, the model posits that organisational stressors initiate a health-impairment process through an emotional-exhaustion climate, that can ultimately damage collective OCBs. The authors also propose that fostering a trust climate, as job resource, buffer the undesirable and negative impact of organisational stressors on exhaustion climate and collective OCB.
The paper opted for a quantitative study. Based on a sample of 718 police officers from 70 French Police stations, the authors follow the procedure outlined by Preacher (2013) to test the moderated-mediation model.
The study show that organisational stressors initiate a health-impairment process through an emotional-exhaustion climate, that can ultimately damage collective OCBs. The authors also demonstrate that fostering a trust climate, as job resource, will not decrease negative effects of organisational stressors but only contained them. Low-trust climate and moderate trust climate will, on the contrary, amplified the negative effects of these organisational stressors.
This paper fulfils an identified need to study stressors-strain-performance relationship at the collective level in a large sample of police officers. The paper includes implications for the development of interventions at the collective level.
