1. Introduction
The need for disciplining the communities against possible flaws in the process of personal as well as social life of individuals is of prime importance for every law enforcement agency. The regulation of society on the basis of the law of the land is possible only if there is a strongly organized and ethically blameless model of policing. In the wake of increasing crimes and issues of fraudulent behavior of the people, the relevance of law enforcement by eligible and educated police officers is significant for the smooth governance of the society. Presently, the effectiveness of the existing system of policing across the globe is questioned by the complex nature of its organizational discipline and the prevalence of confusion caused by the involvement of noble-cause corruption. This paper will evaluate the leadership styles and their effectiveness in policing as a comparative study of nature and impacts of noble cause corruption.
2. Leadership styles and ethics
2.1 Transformational leadership
Under the transformational leadership approach, the leader adopts a variety of mechanisms to enhance motivation, morale, and job performance of followers. Police leaders who strive to inspire, set a vision, and provide intellectual stimulation to their followers may practice this leadership strategy. Evidences suggest that transformational leadership is effective to enhance the audience’s organizational commitment and their willingness to assume additional responsibilities and abide by directives.
2.2 Transactional leadership
Transactional leadership, sometimes referred to as managerial leadership, pays particular attention to the role of supervision, group performance, and organization. In this leadership style, leaders try to ensure compliance of their followers with the directives through rewards and punishments. Transactional leaders take action only when there is a deviation from expected behaviors or service delivery. In policing, transactional leadership is widely practiced to keep subordinates motivated to comply with the performance standards expected.
2.3 Mixed style leadership
Under mixed style leadership, various aspects of transformational and transactional leaderships are combined to enhance the overall performance of the workforce. Experts indicate police leaders who integrated transformational and transactional behaviors are more effective than leaders who focused purely on transformational style or transactional style. When it comes to ethics, mixed leadership approach is more recommendable to address the emotional needs of subordinates and hence to improve the superior-subordinate relationship.
2.4 Active leadership
This leadership approach suggests leaders to employ role-modeling strategies and set themselves a good example for their followers. Management professionals opine that active leadership is really effective to influence the behavior of subordinates. Active police leaders can significantly influence the integrity and ethical outlook of their force. Active leaders do not rely heavily on inspirational motivation or intervention policies like mentoring. Since active leaders lead from the front, subordinates will have a great trust in their leaders and such a worksite environment can notably contribute to a sense of teamwork.
2.5 Situational leadership
Police leaders who follow the situational leadership approach hold the view that there is no single best style of leadership. Situational leaders often set high but attainable goals, take task responsibilities willingly, and distribute duties and responsibilities considering the education and experience of the followers. Situational police leaders are willing to change their behaviors to suit the job context, position, and role of their subordinates. In short, this leadership style specifically focuses on the maturity level of the audience.
2.6 Participative leadership
Referring to Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor (2011), in participative or democratic leadership style, leaders encourage the participation of their followers in decision making process so as to promote the interests of the team members and to practice social equality (p.180). Police leaders who promote the participative leadership strive to positively influence subordinates’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment. When group members are allowed to involve in the decision making, they feel a sense of belongingness, which in turn can improve the overall work culture of the police force.
2.7 Rigid leadership
In the rigid leadership style, the leader and a few of his subordinates would not be willing to adapt to new changes. These leaders may be hesitant to listen to others’ ideas and to consider their followers’ needs. In the view of Caldero and Crank (2010), rigid leadership style leads to a range of control and management problems and is really inefficient for addressing noble-cause dilemmas (p.98).
3. Ethical leadership styles
In the contemporary society, practice of ethical leadership styles in the law enforcement is greatly encouraged for the creation of a peaceful social environment. Regulators have realized the significance of promoting ethical leadership styles in law enforcement agencies so as to ensure sincere efforts from all officials towards the elimination of violence from the society. In traditional days, law enforcement leaders practiced rigid leadership policies to keep their subordinates obedient and active. However, human rights of law enforcement officials are greatly valued today; and therefore authorities concerned pay specific attention to ensuring a humane treatment of those people.
Participative leadership, active leadership, and situational leadership are some of the most recommended leadership styles for law enforcement agencies because those leadership approaches give great focus to ethical aspects. Under participative leadership style, followers are given a voice in the operation of law enforcement agencies and hence they think that they are personally liable for maintaining peace in the society. Law enforcement agencies that follow participative leadership style can enjoy high level staff morale because managerial decisions are made by general consensus. In other words, all decisions made would reflect the shared interests of staff members and hence they will make sincere efforts to enforce the law in the right manner. A responsible leader cannot lead from behind the scenes and therefore it is strongly suggestible for law enforcement leaders to assume a key role in the vision of the organization and in executing the laws. Active leaders will be genuinely concerned about their followers and particularly emphasize the necessity of effective interactions with team members. Finally, situational leadership is also advisable for policing agencies because law enforcement situations are always subjected to changes and hence an inflexible leadership approach may not be viable in all cases.
4. Importance of leadership in law enforcement
Regulators argue that leadership is very important for law enforcement agencies for various reasons. It is disgusting to see that many of the today’s law enforcement managers just try to rule over their subordinate officers and not lead them professionally by example. Effective leadership is vital for those agencies to transform their staff into independent and contributing members of the organization. Line level law enforcement officials must develop adequate leadership skills to tackle the community based law and order challenges of the 21st century. In addition, leadership is essential for effective operations and executive succession management. Decision making is another aspect that necessitates leadership training for law enforcement agencies. It is clear that law enforcement organizations often need to take spot decisions in field situations as there would not be enough time to assess the scenario and collect data to make well informed decisions. Under such circumstances, an experienced and efficient leadership is inevitable to form sound decisions that would safeguard interests of the community.
According to Caldero and Crank, effective application of leadership is vital for law enforcement agencies to regulate the behavior of their street level officers who interact with the general public daily (p.83). Rude behaviors of street level officers may hurt the concept of community policing, which is a recently developed policing strategy that focuses on building relations and working closely with the members of communities in the country. Therefore, street level officers should be properly trained and supervised to behave politely to community members so as to gain their active support in fighting violent terror attacks and other crimes. In the words of Caldero and Crank, police chiefs are expected to provide moral leadership for their departments by performing the roles of a moral leader on the ethical attitude of their officers and issues of departmental responsibility. There are instances where police chiefs fail to control the behavior of their line level officers and this situation extremely demonstrates the vitality of leadership in law enforcement systems. The authors add superior police officers cannot practice command control unless they have adequate leadership skills and a poor command control would result in indiscipline of the force (p.83).
Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the law enforcement personnel have been facing the challenge of unexpected changes in their tasks. Experts say that proper leadership training must be given to those officials to perform their changing tasks effectively and to manage various threats to the community successfully. In a democratic society, ethical behavior and leadership skills are essential for police officers to obtain a powerful position to secure and maintain public safety and social order. Effective leadership in law enforcement agencies may contribute to the creation of a process whereby a community can identify and develop solutions to its problems without an external support. “Thus, it is necessary to recruit, select, and train police officers on the basis of leadership potential, and to provide a vehicle for the development of leadership competence among those already employed in the police service” (Morreale & Ortmeier, 2004).
5. Negatives aspects of noble cause corruption
Corruption at different degrees being the main element of discussion related to policing and law enforcement, the need for a critical evaluation of noble cause corruption is essential. The concept of noble cause corruption deals with the need for persuading the good end of the society with the policing power of an officer or a team of police force. The aspect of noble-cause corruption comprehensively makes a cover for the police officers to justify their own acts which they commit for a perceived benefit of morality. This tendency of the officers giving priority to instantaneous moral justice in legally complex situations makes it all the more difficult to understand from the law enforcement viewpoint. Also, the corruption of morality and professional ethics is a true malice that flows from the leadership level to the bottom-line which can initiate the fall of standard of the policing organization and destructively affect the law enforcement function of any country.
The general perception existing in the society about corruption is only one-dimensional; that is, the word corruption is symbolized in terms of money taken by the police personnel for doing something he is not authorized to, with the knowledge and deliberate attempt to challenge a system. In fact, noble cause corruption is to be recognized as a tendency and practice to collectively manipulate the noble objectives of policing. In the perspective of any common society, the police are the guards and angels of peace and harmony. They are perceived as the friends and caretakers of the general public and the keepers of law and order. That is why they enjoy the power and freedom at a higher level than they actually have to deserve. Contrasting to these expectations, a large proportion of the representatives of the law enforcing agencies are enthusiastic about violating the ethical codes and social expectations of policing. According to the findings of Caldero and Crank, police officers with a corrupt noble cause intent use methods like magic pencil (a term for using incriminating literature in the case report) against the accused to incriminate them and pacify themselves by seeing that the respondent or the department has got justice (p.132). It is not surprising that in various cases, many officers use their power for extreme normative violations like extortion and unlawful custody for monetary or sexual benefits.
The practitioners of this method of corruption aim at establishing a belief among the society that bending rules by the law enforcing officers is acceptable if it is meant for a social good. However, in the process of executing the noble cause corruption, the police are largely observed as using false witnessing at court, allowing flexibility and loopholes in the reports and charge sheets, exempting favorite parties from the charge imposition, coercing false representation of evidences and many more. The reward for committing this kind of a corruption is relative of the parties involved and the nature of the case. For a simple example, political leaders and gangsters are all variously involved in the process of targeting the big names, rich businessmen and emerging industrialists for money; and for running the command of operation, they use the tool of law with the help of any powerful police officer. In circumstances like this, the police officer involved may be forced for the act by the leadership or by the pressurization from the external factors.
Even though economic benefits alone cannot drive the policing behavior, these kinds of situations can give inspiration for some of the people to be vulnerable to corruption. A collective evaluation of various issues of moral conflicts related to the reporting or investigation of many cases shows that the aspect of noble-cause corruption has a devastating effect on the morale of better officers in the group. Since the group of the wrong ones is bigger in size, it can easily swallow the dedicated officers using the benefits of situations or by influencing them personally. Thus the corruption process grows into a large and complicated web by making it difficult for the investigating authorities to unknot the deadlocks and restore the ethical structure of the organization.
6. Negative Impact on Law Enforcement
Noble cause corruption may be largely described as a single-time defiance of rule by a law enforcing officer. This is because the target party takes a higher benefit from the residual condition than the amount of money or kind he has lost in the process. Even though the corrupt one may field justification for the act, the widespread act of repeated instances will degrade the standard of the policing agency entirely. More frequent incidents of economic crimes are itemized and categorized as slippery slope corruptions whose impact is variable based on the size and the circumstance of the offense. According to a suggestion, “it becomes easier, however, to commit more serious wrongful acts after a person has committed minor acts of corruption”. (Caldero & Crank, p.126). It must, therefore, be noticed that the repeated incidents of seemingly small infringements can grow into largely organized economic crimes. Moreover, the leadership defaults in the existing policing system can be blamed for showing wrong models to the new entrants to the department. As Porter and Warrender (n.d.) purport, it may be analyzed that the tendency of learning corruption as seen among the new officers normally starts within the system in which they are exposed to frequent wrongdoings by the seniors. This trend of following wrong models of behavior by individual officers eventually results in the making of a morally corrupt policing organization as its end result.
Moral degradation lying in the policing strategy can cause a collateral damage to the discipline of the organization as well as the concerned community. The aspect of noble-cause corruption can surge the internal indiscipline among the police personnel for various reasons. In a fraudulent structure of organization of individuals, the charge of corruption may not be found out easily. Unlike economic corruption, noble cause corruption has a deep impact in the law enforcement process of the policing organization. Caldero and Crank suggest that noble cause corruption frames a behavioral pattern among the police officers through which they train their moral sense to act upon situations ignoring their accountability to the law, and in this situation, the total scenario changes as the police start behaving like legislators rather than enforcers of law (p.137). This scenario leads to the organizational dysfunction and gradual decline in the law enforcing authority of the department. Moreover, the involvement of top level officers can insulate the cases of noble cause corruption and protect the parties of their interest. However, the result of framing false affidavits for search warrants or court confessions can cause loss of life besides paving way for wide-range civil litigations. A very bad impact of this situation is the polarization of officers that arises the issues of ideological differences and passive disobedience in the structure, which in turn damage the social symbol of law enforcement agencies. Thus, internal factors involving in the corruption are not only threatening to the command of policing, but also detrimental to the fluent process of organizational communication which is essential for the successful enforcement of law.
7. Conclusion
References
Caldero, M. A & Crank, J. P. (2010). Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause. US: Routledge.
Morreale, S. A & Ortmeier, P. J. (2004). Preparing Leaders for Law Enforcement . The PoliceChief, 71 (10). Retrieved from http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=print_display&article_id=1396
Pride, W., Hughes, R & Kapoor, J. (2011). Business. US: Cengage Learning
Porter, L. E & Warrender, C. A Multivariate model of police deviance: examining the nature of corruption, crime and misconduct. Research Paper. Retrieved from http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/28592/57105_1.pdf?sequence=1
