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Abstract
Law enforcement organizations all across the country have been mired in a succession of corruption scandals for the last 30 years. These scandals have threatened to undermine police agencies' effectiveness, because society's trust of the police is needed to carry out the police mission of making people feel safe. My literature review showed that most law enforcement executives and scholars feel that better leadership, ethics training and better hiring and retention are the answers to the corruption problem. This study posits that a particularly strong style of leadership known as servant leadership can eventually create a culture of high ethical standards in a police agency and thus make that agency less susceptible to corruption.
This study is an action research project in a small collegiate police department. The department administrators and I assembled and presented a 16-hour workshop designed to teach the philosophy of servant leadership to all employees. After the employees had been through the workshop, interviews and focus groups showed that the employees overwhelmingly embraced the servant leadership philosophy for their department. They also voiced agreement that servant leadership is a good fit for law enforcement in general. Also, positive changes in the employees were noted in some areas of behavior that would be considered ethical.
The findings from this study beg for additional research to find out why police agencies do not use leadership styles, such as servant leadership and to find out if other and larger police agencies would also embrace servant leadership if it were presented to them.
