Stress in a Highly Demanding Environment: the Role of Leader's Vision-communication on organizational performance in the French Police

Policing is considered one of the most stressful occupations. Police officers are confronted with high demands that can affect their performance. For Kuo (2015), the success of any law enforcement organization depends largely... [ view full abstract ]

Policing is considered one of the most stressful occupations. Police officers are
confronted with high demands that can affect their performance. For Kuo (2015), the success of any law enforcement organization depends largely on a comprehensive understanding of the stressors within organizations and on the efforts to identify and mitigate their impacts on job performance. However, we know relatively little about the impact of work-related stressors on the functioning, and ultimately the performance, of groups within organizations (Jex & Thomas, 2003). Drawing on the job demands-resources theory, we expect emotional exhaustion to partially mediate the relationship between high demanding stressors (organizational and operational) and policemen‘s organizational citizenship behaviors and police station's performance . We further hypothesize that leader’s vision-communication moderates the stressor effects on performance through emotional exhaustion.
We surveyed 2500 French police officers and tested a multilevel mediation model with Mplus. Results indicate that organizational and operational stressors are negatively associated with organizational performance and individual performance. Emotional exhaustion partially mediates these effects. We further demonstrate that leader’s vision-communication moderates the indirect stressors effects on health via emotional exhaustion such that the indirect effect is weaker when leader’s vision-communication is high.
This research contributes to stress and performance researches by providing insight into the health impairment process. Specifically, the negative impact of organizational and operational stressors on police officers’ performance can be buffered by the leader’s visioncommunication. Accordingly, our research highlights the practical importance of training and developing police leaders vision-communication. The findings of this study extend our understanding of the processes implicated in stressors-strain-performance relationships at different level of analysis. We identify leader’s vision-communication an important resource in managing police officers in highly demanding environment.