What about employee supervision?
Are there prescriptions that can be offered to criminal justice supervisors to be more successful? The answer to this question is not simple because it is difficult to delineate supervision from management and what benchmarks are used to gauge success. Research suggests that for most managers, work can be divided into four basic functions: traditional management, including decision making, planning, and controlling; communication, exchanging information and completing paperwork; human resource management, motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, and training; and networking, socializing and politicking with outsiders.
Criminal justice supervisors have to perform all these functions to be successful in the supervisor role, yet the research also suggests that there is a difference between being an effective manager (performs well and gets things done) and a successful manager (speed of promotion within an organization). (See Robbins and Judge, 2007 :8–9, for a more thorough discussion of this topic.) Moreover, the research on effective models of supervision within criminal justice organizations suffers from a dearth of empirically based findings. More often than not, we perform as supervisors within criminal justice organizations based on tradition and informed intuition rather than sound prescriptions from research, even though this is changing in many criminal justice organizations (see the case study in Chapter 15 ).
Nevertheless, there is some research to guide our thinking. traditional supervisor is the person who expects measurable outcomes from subordinates and aggressive law enforcement activities. This type of police supervisor expects officers to produce many arrests and written citations. There is a particular emphasis on rule enforcement and expecting officers to comply with orders and commands.