The Determination of the Level of Organisational Commitment among Police Officers in the Sebokeng Cluster

Abstract

In general, organisational commitment is considered as the inclination of employees to identify with the goals of and retain membership of an organisation. The review of related literature on organisational commitment presupposes that organisational commitment constitutes of three dimensions, namely, affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of organisational commitment among police officers in the Sebokeng Cluster, in South Africa. The Sebokeng Cluster consists of eight police stations: Sebokeng, Vanderbijlpark, Evaton, Orange Farm, Ennderdale, Sharpeville, The Barrage and Boipatong. To achieve the research objective, the organisational commitment of police officers was assessed by means of a survey using a self-administered structured questionnaires distributed to 267 police officers in all the polices stations in the Sebokeng Cluster, with 199 police officers completing and returning the questionnaires. Frequency analysis and the computation of mean scores were performed to analyse data. The results from this study indicated that police officers identified with and were loyal to the safety and security cluster. The police officers felt that they were bound to remain with their safety and security cluster because the costs for leaving were great. Finally, police officers wished to maintain the membership of their safety and security cluster for moral or ethical reasons.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p105