Servant Leadership and Law Enforcement Officers

Abstract

The primary purpose of this quantitative study was to determine to what extent servant leadership exists among law enforcement supervisors of varying positions. Secondarily the research was to help ascertain if there was a relationship between servant leadership and both education and job satisfaction. The study was designed to explore a void in the written literature in which servant leadership is explored as a viable option for law enforcement supervisors. Specifically explored was the existence of servant leadership characteristics identified by Barbuto and Wheeler (2011) through the use of their Servant Leadership Questionnaire. A survey questionnaire was developed on Qualtrics and distributed via an email containing the link to the electronic survey. The test questions concerned the prevalence of the servant leadership characteristics among the law enforcement agents and to what extent these characteristics varied across the levels (ranks) of supervision. Questions were used to solicit responses that would allow the research to indicate if there were any relationships with officers who exhibit servant leadership characteristics and job satisfaction. These questions would also provide data to correlate education levels with the servant leadership characteristics.