Self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as psychological predictors of judicial officer performance

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Joseph A. Hamm,John W. Ropp,Amanda Witwer,Brent A. Scott
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13723

SCHOLARLY TAKES

Self-efficacy, prosocial impact, and self-legitimacy as

psychological predictors of judicial officer performance

Joseph A. Hamm

1,2

| John W. Ropp

1

| Amanda Witwer

1

| Brent A. Scott

3

1

School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

2

Department of Political Science, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

3

Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Correspondence

Joseph A. Hamm, Michigan State University,

557 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.

Email: jhamm@msu.edu

Abstract

The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance.

Participants in a state-wide survey of judicial officers (response rate =33.9 per-

cent) completed self-report measures of self-efficacy, prosocial impact, and self-

legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance

data collected by the state court administrative office were then merged with the

survey data. Latent variable analysis confirmed the three predictor constructs’sep-

arability, and although all four concepts were correlated, self-efficacy was the sole

independent predictor of subjective performance. An unplanned mediation analy-

sis suggested significant indirect effects of self-legitimacy and prosocial impact on

subjectively assessed performance through self-efficacy. Regarding objective per-

formance, self-efficacy emerged as the only significant correlate or predictor.

The research therefore empirically demonstrates the empirical distinctiveness of

self-efficacy, prosocial impact, and self-legitimacy and provides some exploratory

support for a causal model whereby self-efficacy provides the proximal impact on

performance but is itself facilitated by prosocial impact and self-legitimacy.

Evidence for practice

•Judicial officers’self-report assessment of their performance (subjective judicial

performance) is associated, primarily, with the extent to which they feel effica-

cious in their work (self-efficacy).

•The extent to which judicial officers feel they have positive impacts on society

(prosocial impact) and are legitimate legal authorities (self-legitimacy) may serve

as sources of judicial self-efficacy.

•Time to disposition (objective judicial performance) is only associated with the

extent to which judicial officers feel efficacious in their work (self-efficacy).

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the extent to which judicial systems

successfully perform their responsibilities is a key element

of court administration. In particular, scholars have devoted

considerable energy to understanding judicial performance

evaluation (JPE) as a critical piece of maintaining both the

legitimacy of the courts (White, 2002) and public trust in

them (Elek et al., 2012). This diffuse support is then theo-

rized to have real impacts on the ability of the courts to

function as, in most cases, the public must voluntarily bring

disputes into their purview (Cann & Yates, 2008;Wenzel

et al., 2003) and scholarship suggests strong potential for

public disengagement when performance lags

(Black, 1973). It is therefore somewhat curious that relatively

little of this work has considered the factors that explain its

dynamics. Of the work that has been done, the majority

has focused on cross-national comparisons of judicial sys-

tems and aggregate impacts (e.g., Palumbo et al., 2013).

Although instructive, this work generally overlooks psycho-

logical drivers

1

which decades of research in a variety of

organizational contexts have shown to be important.

To address this gap, the current study looks to the sig-

nificant work that has already been done to understand

Received: 27 October 2022 Revised: 4 August 2023 Accepted: 28 August 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13723

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

710 Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:710–725.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

the factors that facilitate employee performance.

Although much of this scholarship foregrounds manage-

ment responses (Hutchins & Wang, 2008; Kovoor-Misra

et al., 2000; Pearson & Mitroff, 1993), a noteworthy

portion considers the psychological determinants of sus-

tained performance, especially in the face of organiza-

tional challenges (e.g., Lee, 2021; Marques-Quinteiro

et al., 2019; see also Hillmann, 2021). The current study

leverages this work to generate hypotheses regarding the

employee-level predictors of judicial performance. Taking

from the literatures addressing self-efficacy and prosocial

impact, we hypothesize that employees who endorse

these concepts are more able to recruit the energy and

investment needed to perform their tasks at relatively

high levels. Given the focus on judicial officers

(i.e., judges, referees, and magistrates), we also integrate

the growing literature addressing self-legitimacy which

is theorized to be a key facilitator of performance

in the criminal legal context (Hacin et al., 2019;

Wuestewald, 2022). Thus, and for the first time, the cur-

rent work uses data collected from judicial officers to

position these three concepts against each other, and

to test their relative prediction of performance which is

measured here both subjectively (via a self-report ques-

tionnaire created by the American Bar Association, 2005)

and objectively (using timeliness data collected by a state

supreme court administrative office). Our findings suggest

an especially important role for self-efficacy but provide

some exploratory evidence of the potential for prosocial

impact and self-legitimacy as key avenues for

increasing it.

In the sections that follow, we review the literature

addressing performance in public organizations before

turning to self-efficacy, prosocial impact, and self-

legitimacy as potential facilitators. As our study leverages

work across a variety of organizational settings to gener-

ate hypotheses for court actors specifically, we start each

section with the broad literature addressing the topic but

then explore its applicability in the criminal legal system

as a somewhat unique context. We then present our

methodology, analytic strategy, and results and discuss

them from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

We conclude by noting three limitations that qualify the

impact of our work.

PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Over the last 20 years, understanding performance has

become a major emphasis of public administration. In

response to increased public disenchantment with the

value for services, scholars started to rethink the funda-

mental goal of public organizations, especially by restruc-

turing organizational bureaucracies into entrepreneurial

organizations (e.g., Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). Through

the development of New Public Management (Kamensky,

1996) and performance management as foundational

lenses for understanding public administration

(Moynihan, 2008; see also Williams, 2003), scholars have

increasingly highlighted a need to attend to and manage

for strong performance across public organizations

(Gerrish, 2016, but see Wang, 2023).

In the criminal legal context, performance has simi-

larly received a great deal of attention. Although

grounded primarily in concerns about diffuse support

and the ultimate legitimacy of the system (Brody, 2008;

Magalh˜

aes & Garoupa, 2020; Paynter & Kearney, 2010),

performance has been argued to have important implica-

tions for achieving a variety of goals like crime reduction

(Pasha, 2017) and justice delivery (Palumbo et al., 2013).

Judicial performance has been a particular consideration

in this literature since the 70s when courts began collect-

ing and publishing state-level performance data to ensure

that voters were informed ahead of judicial retention

elections (Elek et al., 2012). Since then, states across the

country have developed a variety of JPE methods that

range from bar or media polls (White, 2002) to self-report

questionnaires and observations of judicial officers

(Mahoney, 1989), and the use of objective data like the

average time to case disposition (Goelzhauser, 2012). A

variety of best practice standards have been published by

organizations like the National Center for State Courts

(e.g., Elek et al., 2012) and the American Bar Association

(e.g., ABA, 2005).

Despite the considerable practical and scholarly focus

on JPE, considerably less work has considered the factors

that facilitate it. Of the work that does exist, the far major-

ity assesses the impact of contextual pressures. In general,

this work tends to highlight resources and management

structures (Palumbo et al., 2013; Staszkiewicz et al., 2020;

Voigt & El-Bialy, 2016) but some country-specific evalua-

tions also point to the impact of political and social envi-

ronments (Goelzhauser, 2012 [addressing US courts];

Beer, 2006 [addressing Mexican courts]). Although impor-

tant, this work has generally ignored the likely more prox-

imate impact of psychological considerations. This is an

important oversight as a considerable body of work con-

ducted in a variety of organizational contexts has found

strong support for a number of psychological predictors

of employee performance. Some even go so far as to sug-

gest that these psychological constructs play important

roles in determining the ultimate impact of contextual

pressures like the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Tuan, 2021).

We now turn to two such constructs that have received

considerable support as predictors of employee perfor-

mance across organizations and a third that arises from a

growing body of research focused specifically on the

criminal legal system.

SELF-EFFICACY

Research addressing the predictors of employee perfor-

mance across sectors often points to the importance of

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