The Traditional Model of Employee Supervision
The traditional model of employee supervision stresses centralized authority, clear-cut rules and regulations, well-developed policies and procedures, and discernable lines of authority operationally through a chain of command—in short, high degrees of centralization, formalization, and complexity. Contemporary critics, however, question the effectiveness and appropriateness of this model of supervision to the changing societal expectations of the criminal justice system. We will have more to say on this line of criticism later. For now, it is useful to flesh out the key elements of the traditional model of employee supervision used in most criminal justice organizations.
Traditional model of employee supervision: A model that emphasizes clear rules and regulations, division of labor, span of control, delegation of authority, and employee specialization within organizations.
The traditional model is made up of the following elements: a hierarchy that stresses an identifiable span of control, a precise unity of command, and a clear delegation of authority; rulification; and specialization of services and activities of employees ( Gaines, Southerland, and Angell, 1991 ).
Span of control refers to the appropriate number of employees that can be managed by any one supervisor. What this magic number should be has been part of the debates among scholars and practitioners alike. This concept can be applied both to employees and the people they supervise. For example, span of control is a central question in the delivery of services to probationers and parolees ( McShane and Krause, 1993 ). Concerns over the maximum number of probationers who can be supervised by one agent have plagued community corrections officials for years ( Clear and Cole, 1994 ). For police departments, span of control refers to the number of officers that can be reasonably monitored by a supervisor.
Unity of command refers to the placement of one person in charge of a situation and an employee. The importance of this concept to traditional supervision revolves around multiple and conflicting orders from supervisors. For control and supervision to be maximized, there has to be one supervisor, known by every employee. In this way, confusion about directives and commands is reduced, and the employee is aware of to whom he or she must report. In the words of one correctional administrator, “There have to be one chief and a lot of Indians in prison.”
Delegation of authority maintains the integrity of the organization by clearly defining tasks and responsibilities of employees, as well as delegating power and authority to complete required tasks. For police organizations, this means providing employees clear direction on what their responsibilities are, the necessary skills to accomplish tasks, and the requisite authority to achieve objectives. Each employee understands his or her role in the accomplishment of tasks and where they fit into the larger goals of the organization.
Rulification emphasizes the importance of rules and regulations to the organization. Every policy, procedure, and directive must have some specific written referent. In this way, clarity of organizational tasks and purposes is maintained, as well as documentation concerning appropriate behaviors by employees. As a control mechanism, rules, policies, and procedures are the essential components of the organization. One cannot imagine a police or correctional organization existing and functioning without well-specified rules, policies, and procedures. The rules define the scope and direction of criminal justice agencies.
Specialization involves the division of labor in criminal justice organizations. Each employee knows his or her tasks and is held accountable for those tasks. Specialization enhances employee supervision because it is through exact job definition that employees can be evaluated, disciplined, promoted, and dismissed. In most cases, increases in specialization enable advances in employee supervision because there is an increase in responsibility, yet increased specialization may also create administrative coordination problems ( Gaines, Southerland, and Angell, 1991 :101).
Through the concepts of span of control, unity of command, delegation of authority, rulification, and specialization, supervisors are presumed to enhance their supervisory capabilities. For decades, training within police departments and correctional organizations has stressed these important concepts for effective employee supervision. Current advocates, such as DiIulio (1987 , 1991 ), argue that the role of effective management should not be downplayed. DiIulio believes that greater attention should be paid to improving the effectiveness of managers and administrators.
Although his ideas were originally presented within the context of prisons, it is clear that they have equal relevance and application to other criminal justice organizations, such as police departments. Recently, however, research has questioned the efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency of such a model. Critics point out many practical difficulties with the traditional model of supervision such as increased role stress experienced by correctional staff ( Lambert, Hogan, and Tucker, 2009 ) and the perceived unfairness of bureaucratic processes to answer questions of fundamental fairness in criminal justice operations ( Tyler, 2004 ).
One of the most ardent critics of the traditional model of police supervision has been Fyfe (2004a : 146–156). In his view, traditional ideas about police supervision and employee performance have been predicated on largely fictionalized accounts of the police role and inappropriate assessments of police work; they are, he says, more often than not based on perceptions of police supervisors with no input from the officers themselves. The traditional model of supervision stresses arrest statistics, for example, as one outcome measure of performance, yet there is no consideration of the relationship between arrest activity and the realization of organizational goals.
As such, Fyfe argues that it is not clear how the elements of the traditional model of police supervision actually enhance the supervisory process and, more important, how the model itself is related to the goals of police organizations. What gets produced instead is a fractured and misleading picture of police as primarily “crime fighters.” In addition, critics have argued that the traditional model produces authoritarian supervisors, precludes organizational innovation, stymies information flow, and reduces the motivational levels of officers (see Gaines, Southerland, and Angell, 1991 :105–107). Skolnick and Fyfe (1993 :117–124) have argued that many police problems can be traced to the paramilitary style that pervades police organizations.
If such criticisms are correct, the utility of the traditional model to the attainment of organizational goals must be questioned. Goldstein (1990 :157) suggests that the reason the traditional model of employee supervision has lasted so long relates to the ease with which supervision can be routinized. Under the traditional approach, supervision is rather straightforward and predictable. Asking police supervisors—sergeants and lieutenants, in particular—to supervise through innovation consistent with the changes and demands of the community is a more difficult task.
For example, community policing efforts, while expanding the role of rank-and-file officers through decentralization, create enormous challenges for the immediate supervisor. Supervisors now have to respond to the demands of the community in ways that often defy routinization. Furthermore, supervision defined as control becomes more difficult under arrangements that place individual officer autonomy as a higher organizational imperative. For these reasons, traditional police supervisors are highly suspicious and unaccepting of contemporary attempts to redefine the police role more consistently with community policing or problem-oriented police models. These models of police management accentuate the importance of attending to multiple expectations of the community and, as such, demand new ways of doing business in police organizations.
Similarly, correctional organizations are going through changes that are calling into question the relevance and usefulness of the traditional model of employee supervision when faced with competing and multiple demands from the community ( Johnson, 2002 ; Stojkovic and Farkas, 2003 ; Wright, 1994 ). Correctional institutions, parole agencies, and probation departments are all being asked to protect society from criminals; in addition, they are expected to do something productive with offenders so that criminal propensities are reduced. This, too, is no simple set of expectations. Nevertheless, such expectations are altering the context within which correctional agencies, as well as other criminal justice organizations, are functioning. Newer models of employee supervision have been proposed to augment the functioning capabilities of employees to meet these new challenges.
The Human Service Model of Employee Supervision
Unlike the traditional model of employee supervision, which emphasizes monitoring through tight organizational controls, the human service model views the supervision process within the context of both individual employee goals and larger organizational goals. The human service model attempts to integrate employee goals into organizational goals.
What do employees want? They want a number of things, with surprising consistency—both to accomplish job tasks and to feel fulfilled within their roles.