Job characteristics of officers and agents: results of a national job analysis.

The law enforcement community represents a group for which the decision to hire, fire, and make many other personnel-related decisions is of critical importance. When a law enforcement officer or agent is hired, the person must be capable of meeting a wide range of job requirements. If he or she is not fully capable of performing job requirements, the officer or agent can be a danger to him or herself, coworkers, and the general public the person was hired to protect. A particular need is for reliable and valid medical standards. Federal agencies that employ law enforcement officials must ensure that personnel are medically and psychologically fit to perform their duties at the full performance levels. (1)

The organization studied for this article is a large federal agency that employs thousands of people across the United States. To meet its mission, the agency employs between 500 to 2,000 law enforcement officers and agents. Agents are covered by the GS-1811 occupational series and are responsible for planning and conducting investigations. Officers are uniformed personnel covered by the GS-1802 occupational series, and they are responsible for enforcing federal laws and regulations.

In December 2003 the agency initiated data collection procedures for a job analysis of law enforcement positions focusing on identification of essential job functions for the development of medical standards. The job analysis was conducted in cooperation with the Federal Occupational Health (FOH) office, which is an element of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. FOH has the responsibility to develop medical standards for federal law enforcement positions. A statistical analysis of the job characteristic data collected by the agency follows.

The primary objective of this analysis is to answer the question of which job requirements of the law enforcement positions are the most critical for the development of medical standards. Critical job requirements were identified by determining which job characteristics law enforcement personnel currently employed by the agency deem important to job performance and occur frequently. Job relatedness of the requirements identified by law enforcement personnel was established through the use of appropriate statistics. Discussion of related literature and an introduction of the specific design used to obtain the results of the study follow. The presentation of the data collected and the meaning of the results is also considered.

Job Analysis

According to Brannick and Levine, "Job analysis covers a host of activities, all of which are directed toward discovering, understanding, and describing what people do at work. Job analysis is important because it forms the basis for the solution of virtually every human resource problem." (2) More directly, job analysis is a critical HR function because it establishes the extent to which characteristics of a position are job related. Weighing the job relatedness of a position's characteristic is vitally important when making personnel related decisions. For example, when selecting new employees, public employers must make hiring decisions that are consistent with important characteristics of the job. Job analysis is used for, among other things, the development and validation of selection procedures, the setting of minimum qualifications, and the validation of physical ability selection criteria for police officers. (3-5)

Job-related characteristics are also important once employees are hired. In managing a public workforce, decisions related to personnel decisions such as promotions, development, discipline, reassignment, and terminations must also be based on job-related criteria. For example, job analysis has been used to develop a content-valid training report for report writing. (6) When public employers make personnel decisions that are not related to characteristics of the job, they make themselves liable to costly legal action. In addition to litigation, personnel decisions made on criteria that are not job related leave a public employer open to loss of public confidence and degraded performance.

The conducting of job analysis can take many directions. Interviews, observations, survey questionnaires, critical incidents, and worker diaries are all means of systematically conducting job analysis that have an underlying goal of aiding decision making. (7) A key use of job analysis is distinguishing between essential and marginal job functions. Essential job functions are those that are fundamental to a job; marginal job duties are incidental to the job. (8) One of the goals of the research reported here was to help isolate the essential job functions of officer and agent positions.

Only a few studies dealing with job analysis in the context of law enforcement and medical standards have been published. Three of these studies are closely related to the research on officer and agent job requirement data reported here. The three studies involved administration of a survey instrument to better understand the tasks, define job characteristics, or describe the roles and day-to-day functions of incumbents. The first study concerned the job of police chief in the state of Illinois, and it used interviews and a job analysis questionnaire to aid in development of a program for professional credentialing. (9) The second study was a job analysis of the work of occupational and environmental health nurses in the United States. (10) That study also involved the use of a questionnaire to collect rating data on 131 task items. As with the police chief study, the objective was to validate the content of a professional nursing credential. The third study was similar to the job analysis of occupational and environmental health nurses in the United States, but it focused on the roles of occupational health nurses in Japan. (11) The current study extended the use of job analysis by administering a task rating questionnaire to law enforcement personnel in a large federal agency.

Research Design

Questionnaire

The sample was 380 current law enforcement officers and agents. The survey instrument was constructed to shed light on the physical and mental job requirements of officer and agent positions. Development of the questionnaire began with a review of a standard questionnaire previously used for such purposes. The standard questionnaire contained job requirement categories and related questions developed by subject matter experts. The questions addressed topics that are commonly accepted to be relevant to federal law enforcement positions, and a standard questionnaire was adapted for use in focus groups with officers and agents.

The questionnaire used in this study was designed to explore 131 job characteristics spread among eight categories: Work Schedule, Work Environment, Mental and Cognitive Skills, Musculoskeletal/Cardiovascular, Weapons/Defensive Tactics, Senses, Vision, and Hearing. Questions in each category addressed job requirements that are thought to relate to the category. The number of questions per category ranged from seven for senses to 32 for musculoskeletal/cardiovascular.

The importance and frequency of a job characteristic was measured for each characteristic, using Likert scaling. For importance, respondents answered job requirement questions on a scale of zero (function is never related to law enforcement) to five (critically important to job performance, cannot perform the job without this job element). For frequency, respondents had to answer the job requirement questions on a scale of zero (not performed in career) to seven (performed daily).

In addition to job requirement questions, the survey asked respondents to answer eight demographic questions. Standard demographic items such as age and gender were covered in this set of questions. Job-related questions, such as type of position held (officer/agent), years of experience, job status (supervisor/nonsupervisor), and federal General Schedule grade level were also asked. A final question provided respondents the opportunity to write in information on tasks not covered by the survey and to provide comments and suggestions.

After completed surveys were submitted, they were coded into a format necessary for statistical analysis. The resulting dataset was analyzed using statistical applications in Excel and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

Statistical Analysis

There are two basic components to the data analysis reported in this article. The first component is the mean and mode for each question in the survey. The second is a factor analysis that establishes the validity of the job requirement data.

Factor analysis is especially useful when there are many variables, as in this study. A factor, which in this study can be understood as a job characteristic category, is a condensed statement of the relationship among a set of variables. (12) In setting up the factor analysis, each of the eight categories addressed in questions one through 131 was treated as a factor. Factor analysis was used to confirm the existence of an overall job characteristic and to determine which questions were most closely associated with a given characteristic.