Abstracts Law

The Relationship between Servant Leadership and Self-Efficacy among Law Enforcement Officers in Western North Carolina

by Anthony Scott Teague

The role of a servant united with the role of a leader, combines to form the servant leader. The term self-efficacy is defined as a person’s belief in the ability within a specific situation to be successful. The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental correlational descriptive research study was to discover law enforcement officers’ perception regarding the influence of the servant leader behaviors of their immediate supervisor on the officers’ own self-efficacy level in law enforcement officers located in western North Carolina. Law enforcement officers who attended training at two community colleges in western North Carolina was surveyed for this study. Correlational analysis was used to determine if a relationship exist between self-efficacy and servant leadership. Participants were asked to take two surveys; Servant leadership questionnaire (SLQ) by John Barbuto and Daniel Wheeler published in 2006 and Everything you wanted to know about the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) but were afraid to ask by Ralf Schwarzer and Matthias Jerusalem published on May 30th, 2014. The sample size for the study was 112 participants and who completed two surveys of which no outliers were removed. The analyses of the data failed to reject all null hypotheses and showed the data was not normally distributed. Due to the lack of normal distribution Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient rho (⍴) was employed for the correlation tests. Based on the assessment of the numerical and graphical data no significant relationship between the officers’ perceived servant leadership level of their immediate supervisor and the officers’ self-reported self-efficacy level is concluded. This study does not identify causality just correlation.