The impact of perceived organizational support on PTSD symptomology among law enforcement officers: A moderated moderation model.

Law enforcement officers regularly encounter critical incidents (e.g., discharging weapons, police pursuit). Such incidents are often traumatic, with an accumulation of traumatic incidents potentially resulting in the development of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). However, there are multiple factors that could have an impact on the association between critical incidents and PTSD. One such factor, which has been documented by previous research, is work environment stress. Work environment stress can generate risk for PTSD and includes working overtime, fatigue, changes in legislation, and inadequate equipment and/or training. A second factor that can have implications for the development of PTSD symptomology, which has been largely overlooked but may act as a protective factor, is perceived organizational support (POS). POS has been found to be negatively related to PTSD symptoms and may decrease the likelihood of PTSD symptom development for law enforcement officers who have experienced a critical incident. We hypothesized that work environment stress would moderate the association between frequency of critical incidents and PTSD symptoms. Furthermore, we hypothesized that POS would interact with work environment stress to moderate the association between frequency of critical incidents and PTSD symptoms. Participants for this study were 120 law enforcement officers from various agencies across the state of Texas. The average age of participants was 42.23 years (SD = 11.09), with 97 (80.8%) participants identifying as male. Work environment stress interacted with critical incident frequency to impact PTSD symptoms (p = .05). POS did not significantly interact with overall work environment stress and critical incident frequency to impact PTSD symptoms. However, exploratory analyses examining two forms of work stress (operational and organizational) found that only organizational stress interacted with critical incident frequency to impact PTSD symptoms (p = .03). Implications and future directions are discussed.