Case Summary

1. Summarize the most common causes of employee dissatisfaction, and discuss the options a law enforcement agency or corrections facility has in dealing with employee grievances. Identify the factors that are relevant to a determination of how an employee grievance should be handled.

Case Analysis

2. What are the supervisory or management practices most likely to cause employee dissatisfaction? What effects on the individual officer and on the organization are associated with unresolved employee dissatisfaction? What impact does a supervisor's attitude about the employee's grievance have on employee dissatisfaction? How should a supervisor respond to an employee grievance that the supervisor believes is without substantial merit?

3. Define and discuss the specific actions and behaviors of supervisors that will erode employee morale and adversely impact efficiency in a police department or corrections facility.

4. Define what is meant by "due process" in the context of disciplinary actions involving police or corrections employees. Describe a public employee's "property interest" and "liberty interest" in his or her position. Identify the legal consequences that may follow from a failure to afford procedural due process to an officer.

5. Critically analyze the relevant distinctions between internal, external, and anonymous complaints and how subsequent investigations should be conducted in a police department or corrections facility. Briefly discuss the relative weight that should be given to each type of complaint, and how the supervisor should handle the complaint. Justify your response by referencing course materials or other scholarly sources of information.

6. Define and discuss the "balancing test" applied to investigations of employee conduct that may or may not be job-related. Analyze how the Supreme Court's 1985 holding in City of Muskegon v. Briggs should be applied in a case of police or correction officer off-duty conduct that is objectionable but not illegal.

7. Explain why "a supervisor should follow up to ascertain the effect of any disciplinary action that was imposed" by referencing relevant principles of personnel complaint investigations?

8. Imagine that you are a first-line supervisor at a police department or corrections facility. You noticed that a veteran officer is hypercritical of new officers, and goes out of his way to make things difficult for them. The veteran officer is not technically violating any policy, so there is no basis for disciplinary action. Should you transfer the veteran officer to an assignment that limits his contact with new officers? What alternatives should you consider other than a transfer?