Determinants of police job satisfaction: Does community matter?

Research on police job satisfaction has found that work-related factors had greater influence on job satisfaction than personal characteristics. These studies, however, tend to overlook the effects of community characteristics on officers' perception of satisfaction with their job except very limited studies (e.g. Buker and Dolu, 2010). The current study contributes to the literature by examining relative effects of demographic, work-related, and community characteristic factors on police officers' work satisfaction and exploring invariance of relationships among these variables across types of duty. To this end data of Korean police officers are analyzed with multilevel modeling techniques (HLM). The results indicate that neither community characteristics nor demographic characteristics have any influence on job satisfaction, while work-related variables, in particular, support from coworkers and support from supervisors significantly affect officers' satisfaction with job.