TURNOVER AT THE TOP: EXAMINING CORRELATES ASSOCIATED WITH TURNOVER INTENTIONS AMONG POLICE CHIEFS

Police chiefs play a pivotal role within society and operate within complex political environments. Despite their important roles within communities and agencies, however, little is known about their well-being and the reasons impacting their willingness to leave their organizations. This dearth in the literature is concerning as the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted that officer safety and wellness involves all officers at all administrative levels. Thus, this study examines two factors that have been examined in length within other disciplines, work-family conflict and organizational commitment, but underexplored in relation to turnover intentions among police chiefs. Therefore, this study had two purposes. First, the goal was to examine the influence work-family stressors had on turnover intentions. Secondly, the goal was to further examine the influence a three-component model of organizational commitment had on chiefs’ willingness to leave their organizations. More specifically, to disentangle the influence affective, continuance, and normative commitment have on this work-related outcome. By accomplishing these tasks, the study expands on previous turnover intentions literature specific to police chiefs. Data were collected from 249 newly appointed Texas police chiefs from varying types and sizes of police departments. Results indicated that the chiefs reported little intentions to leave their organizations and had reported moderate to high levels of affective and normative commitment. Respondents also reported having low levels of v work-family conflict. Specific to key independent variables, affective commitment and strain-based work-family conflict were found to have a significant relationship to TI. Findings, policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.