Predicting Law Enforcement Officer Turnover Using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R).
详细信息
文摘
The selection of law enforcement applicants is important to agencies because of the time and expense involved in training new officers. The NEO PI-R personality assessment has been used for personnel selection in law enforcement. There are no studies, however, addressing how the components of the NEO PI-R are predictive of law enforcement turnover. The literature suggests that the NEO PI-R extroversion and conscientiousness domains are associated with performance. There is a lack of understanding, however, regarding how these domains relate to one important aspect of performance: turnover during the first year of employment. Developing a better understanding of the relationship between the extroversion and conscientiousness domains and turnover could provide insight into why some applicants turnover employment during the first year. The goal of the study was to identify the domains and facets of the conscientiousness and extraversion scales that have a relationship with law enforcement employment of less than one year. The study was a quantitative analysis of the archival employment and psychological records of 200 law enforcement officers of the Amarillo Texas Police Department who were given the NEO PI-R during the employment selection process. Modest but significant correlations were found between days of employment and the E1 facet of warmth (r ＝ -.150, p ＝ .034), the E3 facet of assertiveness (r ＝ -.182, p ＝ .010), and the C3 facet of dutifulness (r ＝ -.181, p ＝ .011). Backward stepwise multiple regression revealed facets E3 assertiveness, C5 self-defense, C1 competence, C3 dutifulness, and E1 warmth accounted for a statistically significant variation in days of employment (R ＝ .297, R2 ＝ .088, adjusted R2 ＝ .065, F(5,194) ＝ 3.762, p ＝ .003, standard error estimate 1,015.264). Independent-samples t-test showed that the E6 positive emotions facet was predictive of employment less than one year, t(40.718) ＝ -2.355, p ＝ .023, d ＝ .449. The negative results were counter-intuitive and should be replicated by other research. With only modest results that were contrary to expectations and the literature, more research should be done before these results are used for employment decisions.