Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 37, Issue 1, January–February 2009, Pages 85-97
Journal of Criminal Justice

Improving performance in a Swedish police traffic unit: Results of an intervention

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2008.12.008Get rights and content

Abstract

This article describes the results of a feedback system designed to improve performance for a Swedish traffic police unit and examined whether such a feedback system was beneficial or detrimental to the attitudes of the officers. As in many Western countries, government organizations are being required to demonstrate their effectiveness with quantitative performance measures. An approach called the Productivity Measurement and Enhancement System (ProMES) was used with three groups of Swedish Traffic Police to do this. ProMES is a method for identifying unit's objectives, developing measures for these objectives, and using this information as feedback. ProMES was developed with these police units and feedback from the system was used over a four-year period. Results indicate that there were substantial increases in performance. There were also decreases in accidents, injuries, and fatalities compared both to baseline and to comparison groups in Sweden. These improvements were made with fewer and fewer police officers each year.

Introduction

As in many Western countries, government organizations are being required to become more accountable by using performance measures to evaluate the contributions made by the agency. In addition, agencies are being increasingly asked to monitor and improve their performance as the need to control budgets and pressures to downsize remind decision-makers of the need to do more with less. While this need to be more efficient while maintaining effectiveness is important, however, there are other factors to consider. For example, it is also important that every employee understands the overall organizational mission as well as the plan to accomplish that mission using departmental goals and objectives (Harrison, 1996). It is not always clear to departments, however, how to accomplish this without destroying morale.

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate a specific intervention that accomplished these objectives with a sample of Swedish traffic police units. This study sought to examine the results of a measurement and feedback system for improving performance while also increasing alignment of efforts with organizational objectives. In this article, performance is defined as how well the outputs produced by the unit meet organizational objectives. The effects of this intervention on attitudes of the officers were also examined. A secondary purpose of this study was to explore two problematic measurement issues common to many types of work, but especially to police work: control over outcomes and detection of negative events. This article first describes the theoretical background underlying the intervention, followed by a summary of how the intervention is done and a discussion of specific measurement issues. The article concludes with a presentation of the results of the intervention and a discussion of the findings.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

The intervention used in this study was the Productivity Measurement and Enhancement System, or ProMES (Pritchard, 1990, Pritchard, 1995, Pritchard et al., 2008, Pritchard et al., 2002). ProMES is a results-oriented measurement and feedback system specifically designed to improve performance over time, while at the same time improving the quality of work life. The theoretical background of ProMES comes primarily from the motivational aspects of the Naylor, Pritchard, and Ilgen (1980) (NPI)

The Productivity Measurement and Enhancement System (ProMES)

The next section describes the specific intervention used. This is followed by a discussion of how the intervention operationalizes the theory and other literatures.

Specific measurement issues

Two specific measurement issues must be addressed in any measurement of police performance, whether ProMES or another approach is used. A special focus of this project was to attempt to deal with these issues in a novel way.

Team climate perceptions

Although performance improvement is certainly important, it should not be at the expense of employees. Furthermore, not every individual or department may be open to change. If individuals are not open to change or if they do not benefit from the introduction of a new intervention, then large gains in performance would not be expected. Therefore, whether officer attitudes toward their unit and the department and the climate for innovation were improved or worsened following the implementation

Participants and procedure

The participants in this study constituted the entire traffic police personnel in Örebro County, an area near the center of Sweden, due west of Stockholm. The implementation of ProMES started during the autumn 1996, and was done with three teams or shifts of police officers in the traffic division, a total of thirty-three people at the start of the project. The officers in the three separate shifts were responsible for monitoring compliance with speed limits, investigating traffic accidents,

Effects of the ProMES intervention

The first hypothesis dealt with whether ProMES feedback would improve performance. Fig. 2 shows these results. The horizontal axis is time showing baseline data available for five months, from August 1996 to December 1996. Feedback started in January 1997 and data were available from then until October 2001.

The vertical axis is the overall effectiveness score averaged across the three units. This is the sum of the effectiveness scores from all the indicators. Fig. 2 indicates that in the months

Team climate perceptions

Hypotheses 3-6 concerned the effects of the ProMES intervention on the four TCI dimensions. For each dimension, planned pairwise group comparisons were conducted to compare the team climate perceptions during baseline and feedback. A priori comparisons were made for each of the four dimensions between scores obtained in 1996 (baseline) and the average of those obtained in 1997 and 2001 (feedback). For each of the four dimensions, it was hypothesized that the scores during feedback would be

Discussion

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the ProMES intervention on performance and attitudes. The ProMES effectiveness scores indicated large gains in performance and the measures external to the system (accidents, injuries, and fatalities) decreased relative to baseline and relative to the rest of Sweden, although the reduction in the number of fatalities was not statistically significant. This was all occurring despite the decreases in the number of officers over

Conclusions

In conclusion, this article describes the results of a feedback system designed to improve performance for a Swedish traffic police unit and examines whether such a feedback system is beneficial or detrimental to the attitudes of the officers. Results indicated that there were substantial increases in performance and significant decreases in accidents, injuries, and fatalities compared both to baseline and to comparison groups in Sweden, all while number of officers was decreasing.

Acknowledgements

This article expands on work presented earlier in a chapter by Agrell and Malm (2002). Additional data are presented, more appropriate analyses are used, additional measurement issues are addressed, and implications of the results for criminal justice settings are presented.

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