Gender Variations of Physiolocical and Psychological Stress Among Police Officers

This paper analyses the effect of gender on reported and perceived levels of stress through examination of both the physical and psychological indicators. It may be interesting to work with police data due to high stress levels among police officers and the fact that the work environment is male dominant (females are a minority). In our study we not only explore gender differences, but also whether job and private environmental factors such as effective cooperation between units, a higher trust in the work partner, a higher level of work-life-balance and home stability, and a higher level of interactional fairness, affect female and male officers differently. Using multivariate regression analysis of police officers we find that female officers are significantly more likely to report suffering from physical stress indicators than their male counterparts while no gender differences are observable in regards to psychological stress. Moreover, a higher level of trust and cooperation, and a higher level of interactional fairness at work are not able to absorb physical stress among female, while these factors have a strong impact on male officers. On the other hand, for both, female and male officers, work-life balance and stability at home have the tendency of reducing physical stress.Gender, Stress, Police Officers, Burnout, Work-life Balance, Justice

Efficient Contracting and Fair Play in a Simple Principal-Agent Experiment

We study behavior within a simple principal-agent experiment. Our design allows for a large class of linear contracts. Principals can offer any feasible combination of (negative) fixed wages and incentives in the form of return sharing. This great contractual flexibility allows us to study incentive compatibility simultaneously with issues of 'fair sharing' and reciprocity, which were previously found to be important. We find a high degree of incentive-compatible behavior, but also 'fair sharing' and reciprocity. In contrast to other incentive devices studied in the literature, the incentives are 'reciprocity-compatible'. Principals recognize the agency problem and react accordingly. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002principal-agent theory, contract theory, fair sharing, incentive contracts, reciprocity, experiments,

Retaining the Thin Blue Line: What Shapes Workers' Willingness Not to Quit the Current Work Environment

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of police officersÕ willingness to quit their current department. For this purpose, we work with US survey data that covers a large set of police officers of the Baltimore Police Department in Maryland. Our results indicate that more effective cooperation between units, a higher trust in the work partner, a higher level of interactional justice and a higher level of work-life-balance reduces police officersÕ willingness to quit the department substantially. On the other hand, higher physical and psychological stress and the experience of traumatic events are not, ceteris paribus, correlated with the willingness to leave the department. It might be that police officers accept stress as an acceptable factor in their job description.Willingness to Quit the Job; Turnover Rates: Job Satisfaction; Stress; Police Officers; Work-Life Balance; Fairness; Acceptance

Shedding new light on intrinsic motivation to work: evidence from a discrete choice experiment

In this paper, we evaluated the determinants of the decision utility of workers from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. In our setting, decision utility is the weight assigned by workers to the expected benefits of different job offers. We used a conjoint analysis method based on experimental data on workers' stated preferences towards hypothetical job offers that were characterised by ten attributes. The intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers was investigated by specifically analysing the influence of three of these attributes, specifically wages, working time, and loyalty of the employer, on decision utility. The results showed evidence of motivational differences between the for-profit and nonprofit groups. First, nonprofit workers attained their maximum decision utility after a longer working time, showing superior intrinsic motivation for work. Furthermore, they were ready to give up a higher percentage of their wages in order to work for another extra hour than were for-profit workers, as long as the working week was less than 33 hours. Finally, our findings show that for-profit workers placed more value on job offers with a labour contract including an explicit clause stating that higher effort will be exchanged for the employer's loyalty. In contrast, nonprofit workers did not obtain higher utility from such a deal. We interpret this result as evidence for the intrinsic motivation of people employed in the nonprofit sector. As the nature of the implicit goals pursued in the nonprofit sector provides employees with high work morale, nonprofit workers do not obtain any gain in utility from an explicit clause regarding the employer's loyalty. Copyright � 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.