POLICING FROM WITHIN: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE AND SELF-LEGITIMACY IN SHAPING OFFICERS’ MINDSETS

<p dir="ltr">Despite over a decade of police reform efforts following high-profile cases of excessive force by officers, scholars and practitioners have increasingly focused on understanding officers’ mindsets. The warrior-guardian framework has been extensively studied to explain officers’ orientations toward specific mindsets and to find solutions when officers approach community encounters with contextually inappropriate mindsets, which can lead to adverse outcomes such as officer-involved shootings. While previous studies have examined organizational and demographic factors influencing officer mindsets, they have overlooked individual-level factors. This gap presents a critical limitation in understanding how officers’ perceptions shape their mindset orientations.</p><p dir="ltr">This dissertation explores how officers orient toward warrior or guardian mindsets through organizational justice and self-legitimacy theories. Using survey data from 129 officers across five U.S. police departments, this study examines how perceptions of organizational justice and self-legitimacy influence whether officers orient toward a warrior or guardian mindset. The hypotheses propose an indirect relationship where perceptions of organizational justice influence self-legitimacy, which in turn shapes mindset orientations. These hypotheses are tested through ordinary least squares regression and bootstrapped mediation analysis.</p><p dir="ltr">Findings confirmed that perceptions of organizational justice have a significant influence on an officer’s self-legitimacy. However, contrary to expectations, there was no significant relationship between self-legitimacy and the guardian mindset. Instead, a notable positive relationship was found between self-legitimacy and the warrior mindset. Specifically, officers who perceive high organizational justice tend to have greater self-legitimacy, which then orients them toward a warrior mindset. This challenges the theoretical expectation that officers with diminished self-legitimacy would orient toward a warrior mindset. Mediation analysis showed that self-legitimacy mediates the relationship between perceptions of organizational justice and the warrior mindset. These findings emphasize the complexity of warrior-guardian mindsets and provide new insights for evidence-based police training and policy recommendations.</p>