British police service performance diagnosis: a critical realist (quantitative) perspective

There has been increasing concern about the lack of adherence to total quality management
principles among public and private sector organisations who espouse a quality orientation.
One example is the British police service. While it's new appraisal system (adopted
nationally in 2004) has much to commend it, little can be regarded as quality compliant. The
problem is its traditional outlook. Quality systems are focused on team-working with the
assumption that processes, not people are the problem. The new police appraisal makes no
such assumption retaining an emphasis on the individual as the major determinant of
organisational performance. It is this contrast which focuses the present research not only
concerning issues of performance assessment and appraisal but also diagnosis. It introduces
the theory of planned behaviour as a remedy which incorporates organisation culture/climate,
simultaneously, as indirect beliefs. It uses familiarity assessments to overcome increasing
concerns about traditional elicitation processes. This produces the first research question: To
what extent will integrating organisation culture/climate as indirect (top down) beliefs in the
theory of planned behaviour provide a legitimate model for intervention and change in quality
organisations? It also raises concerns about the theory's prediction of behaviour in
circumstances of an annual appraisal and produces the second research question: To what
extent will expanding the adapted theory of planned behaviour to include measures of
performance self awareness (past behaviour, current expected behaviour and negative
affectivity) provide a more legitimate model for intervention and change in quality
organisations? Both these questions are addressed from a critical realist perspective, focused
on the repeated self report returns of 325 personnel from a single English constabulary,
conducted over two years. Aggregated to the group mean these measures provide evidence of
bottom-up emergent processes analysed using structural equation modelling. Results support
first the adapted theory of planned behaviour as a solid foundation for further development,
and second its expansion as a legitimate model for intervention and change in quality
organisations. Overall, the research provides for the quantitative improvement of British police service performance management and appraisal procedures, also relevant to other
quality organisations. It also produces a number of theoretical, methodological and applied/
practitioner implications which are discussed together with study limitations.

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