Police Cadets’ Career Plans in China: Testing the Mediation and Moderation Effects of Job Satisfaction

• Date: 01 June 2020
• Author: Bitna Kim,Tao Xu
• DOI: 10.1177/1098611119887811
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Cadets’ Career

Plans in China: Testing

the Mediation and

Moderation Effects

of Job Satisfaction

Bitna Kim

1

and Tao Xu

2

Abstract

In recent decades, police organizations have encountered difficulty in maintaining

employees; a large number of police officers are leaving the service early. Using data

collected from three police colleges in three different provinces in China, this study

examines the mechanism of cadets’ career plan or turnover intention. Specifically,

the test of a mediating mechanism in this study demonstrates the extent to which

satisfaction mediates the relationship between distal factors and career plans among

police cadets. Besides, the test of a moderating mechanism focuses on the possibility

that the predictors differ in the relationship with cadets’ career plans by the degree

of satisfaction. This study results found that satisfaction had no mediating effect.

Instead, results showed that police cadets’ satisfaction is a strong moderator in

the link between predictors and their career plans. Implications for recruitment,

training, and retention strategies, as well as avenues for future research, are then

discussed.

Keywords

police cadets, turnover mechanism, career plan, job satisfaction

1

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA

2

International School, Zhejiang Police College, Hangzhou, China

Corresponding Author:

Bitna Kim, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA

15705, USA.

Email: bitna.kim@iup.edu

Police Quarterly

2020, Vol. 23(2) 202–231

!The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/1098611119887811

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Introduction

Voluntary turnover is a severe problem for many criminal justice agencies

around the world (Shim, Jo, & Hoover, 2015; Matz, Woo, & Kim, 2014).

While complete data nationwide is unavailable, journalists and scholars have

reported that the turnover of public security personnel is high in China (Nan,

2015; Scoggins & O’Brien, 2016). It is of particular importance due to the costs

associated with hiring and training new personnel and overtime for other staff to

cover the loss of workers (Swider, Boswell, & Zimmerman, 2011).

In recent decades, police organizations have encountered more difficulty in

retaining officers (Drew, Carless, & Thompson, 2008; Matz et al., 2014; Orrick,

2005). This is often pointed out by researchers studying Chinese police (Chen,

2018). A number of reasons including the heavy workload, low citizen cooper-

ation, a low level of job autonomy, and the lack of manpower in the police force

act in combination and influence police job attitudes in China (Chen, 2018;

Wang, 2014; Zhou, 2013). Scoggins and O’Brien’s (2016) interview with

Chinese police officers revealed that police frustration appears in all ranks,

but especially among entry-level officers. They concluded that police frustration

and grievances had not been reduced by financial reforms started in 2003,

designing to make counties contribute a higher percentage of their budget to

support public security operations.

Allisey, Noblet, Lamontagne, and Houdmont (2014) explain that “training

police officers is an expensive, labor-intensive process and even relatively small

increases in turnover rates can be expensive” (p. 767). Other policing scholars

stress that even turnover intent, an individual officer’s estimated probability that

they will leave an organization at some point in the near future, reduces the

overall effectiveness of an organization (Brough & Frame, 2004; M. Smith &

Brough, 2003).

The policing literature is replete with factors that seek to explain officer

turnover intention. Researchers have contended that identifying the factors con-

tributing to turnover intention should be the first step to find ways to reduce

actual turnover levels and enhance retention rates within policing (Brough &

Frame, 2004; Maertz & Campion, 1998). While the majority of research has

scrutinized individual predictors of turnover intention, Brough and Frame

(2004) and, more recently, Allisey et al. (2014) have investigated the turnover

process with the factors influencing officers’ turnover intentions. These research-

ers assumed that identifying the turnover mechanism and factors involved in the

mechanism benefits policing organizations by giving them the opportunity to

monitor distal factors before leading to turnover intentions and intervene during

the turnover process before employees commit to quitting. Brough and Frame

(2004) proposed a turnover process model that utilizes job satisfaction as a

mediating variable in the relationship between job characteristics and turnover

Kim and Xu 203