Examining the Effectiveness of the Leadership in Police Organizations SM Progra

The increasing complexities associated with modern policing create leadership challenges for leaders of police organizations. Traditional police leadership styles that have been based on bureaucratic, authoritarian models of leadership may no longer be effective, therefore; education and training of police leaders is evolving and changing. Leadership in Police OrganizationsSM (LPO) is a training program developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police that uses an adult learning environment to focus on leadership behavior theories and problem solving. Over 200 local, state, and federal police organizations have had participants in LPOSM and have expended organizational resources in desire of improved leadership. Although thousands of students have successfully completed LPOSM training, the problem addressed in this study was that no empirical evidence exists that the program is successful in increasing the effectiveness of its graduates. The purpose of this ex-post facto quantitative study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the LPOSM program by answering two research questions regarding changes in overall performance, collaboration and teamwork, problem solving, and goal attainment as indicated on annual performance assessments of lieutenants employed by the Minnesota State Patrol (MSP) who successfully completed the LPOSM program. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Human Resources Department provided unidentifiable archived performance assessment data from 21 MSP lieutenants meeting study criteria of having the same assessment rater before and after participating in the LPOSM program. The before and after LPOSM data were coded and analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test in IBM's SPSS software. Results of the analysis indicated no statistically significant change in the four measured leadership behaviors. The results provide no evidence to reject the null hypothesis of research question one regarding the impact of participation in the LPO SM program on overall performance or the null hypothesis of question two regarding the impact of participation in the LPOSM program on collaboration and teamwork, problem solving, or goal attainment. The findings imply that the LPOSM program may not be effective as a MSP leadership development intervention. Further research is recommended to evaluate the effectiveness of the LPOSM program and other police leadership development programs.