Criminal Justice Leadership

OVERVIEW:

This assignment serves as a mini-research activity designed to foster critical thinking skills and application of course materials. You must show evidence of using that week’s readings to guide your responses to the following questions and scenarios. You must cite the lectures and readings. You will also cite and appropriately incorporate at least 2-3 additional/original peer-reviewed journal articles to support research findings from the text and your experiences. You should also cite all non-academic sources you used (websites, news articles, etc.).

Papers will be a minimum of 4 pages (not including reference page), Times New Roman, font 12, double-spaced, and follow APA or ASA Guidelines. Please see the writing resources I provided for more guidance on formatting and writing style expectations.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Leadership should not be confused with position or rank, although leaders often occupy positions of authority. Nor should leadership be confused with management. Leadership, which is broader than management, occurs anytime one attempts to motivate, influence, or mobilize an individual or a group. Management, on the other hand, involves directing people toward organizational goals. Early approaches to the study of leadership focused on leadership traits, or qualities, while more recent approaches address leadership competencies. Although critical to effective and ethical leadership, qualities such as understanding, courage, compassion, respectfulness, and genuineness are difficult to measure by any objective standard. Competencies, or skills, however, can be learned and competency acquisition and practice can be measured objectively.

Use your knowledge of leadership to respond to the following:

1. In your personal experience, who has been an example of a great manager or supervisor? What traits or qualities made them great? What competencies/skills made them great?
   a. OR you could pick one that had a positive impact and one that had a negative impact on you. Describe the attributes of both and then compare and contrast.
2. In your personal experience, who has been an example of a great leader? What qualities made them great? What competencies/skills made them great?
3. Great leaders are self-disciplined people who know their key signature strengths and they make every effort to rely on them in the performance of their work, and indeed, their life. Identify at least three strengths of yours and explain each using examples. Relate your strengths to qualities and skills.

Organizations are defined as a consciously coordinated social entity, with a relatively identifiable boundary, that functions on a relatively continuous base to achieve a common goal or set of goals (Robbins, 1990). An organization is a tool used by people to coordinate their actions to obtain something they desire or value — i.e., to achieve their goals. An organization therefore is a response to and a means of satisfying some human need. Structures will vary based on the organization’s needs.

Use your knowledge of organizations to respond to the following:

4. Search the web for police departments to analyze their organizational structure. Focus on the structure’s fluidity, rank structure, division of labor, lines of communication, and so on. Emphasis should also be placed on the extent to which policies and procedures, rules and regulations, and general orders are used to guide the organization.
5. Additionally, try to find and provide charts of large and medium-sized police departments and identify the number of levels within each organization. Compare the 2 sizes of organization.

Criminal justice leaders can implement change through a change in values and missions. They may also change policies and procedures to make changes. They should instill commitment and accountability. A mission statement is a statement of a department’s commitment to the community and provides information about how the department will accomplish (Peak, Gaines, & Glensor, 2019, p. 13). A mission statement should represent the ideology and goals of the representative organization.

Use your knowledge of organizational and police goals to respond to the following:

6. Search the web for police departments that display value and/or mission statements. Compare and contrast at least 3 of these department value and/or mission statements.
7. Prepare, or design, a value statement for a hypothetical medium-sized police department. Compare the statement you created to existing statements and explain how you would expect to see these values in practice.

References
Peak, K., Gaines, L.K., & Glensor, R.W. (2019). Managing and leading today’s police: Challenges, best practices, case studies (4th ed.). Pearson.
Robbins, S. P. (1990). Organization theory: Structure, design, and applications. Prentice-Hall.