Theory X And Theory Y's Role In The Police Department

During my tenure as a law enforcement officer I have observed numerous issues which affected the police department and the officers who serve the community. Two specific issues for discussion include motivation and how Theory X and Theory Y play a dominating role in this regard and emotions and moods noting how Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) is a significant contributing factor to the emotional stability of an officer in the workplace.
Motivation
One of Douglas McGregor’s assertions with Theory X and Theory Y was the essence that a manager’s cosmology or assumptions about people at work, was a self-fulfilling prophecy (Lawter, Kopelman, & Prottas, 2015). Theory X is described as a pessimistic view of employees where they must be

When I began policing the chief at the time was the epidemy of Theory X. Thus, he did not trust the officers were working calls nor had any ability to affect an arrest without first contacting a supervisor. Therefore, the officers felt little to no motivation to try and solve problems on their own and we went through an archaic time of no advancement with strategies for solving or reducing crime. We merely responded to crimes and had no proactive enforcement or community engagement strategies. Eventually, we obtained a new chief who embraced Theory Y style of motivation and believed the officers had significantly more potential he then challenged the supervisors to this style of engagement and thinking. With Theory Y, one has a positive set of assumptions about employees and believe they are engaged, committed and responsible (Kinicki & Fugate, 2016). More specifically,

Generationally, the senior officers spent a majority of their career simply doing as they were told and if they were in error then the blame fell on someone else. The younger officers flourished with the challenge of fail forward and learn from your mistakes and enjoyed the support of being allowed to try new policing ideas. Senior officers became moody and angry and difficult to collaborate with and struggled with the transition of independent thinking and problem solving. In the video clip Decision Making Overload (2013) the concept of limiting decision possibilities came to the forefront with the senior officers to assist with this transition. Instructing the officers to choose a policing strategy from five options when they entered the high crime area for a set period help provide the direction and guidance they needed to be successful giving them the autonomy to select a strategy yet instill the idea of creating their own plan to reduce crime.
Thus, POB was embraced by collaboration with other shifts and divisions and meaningfulness of a common goal of reducing crime after a decade of increases. The officers were shown humility, wisdom, and positive energy by the supervisors and in turn complaints were reduced and crime has declined. Therefore, positive emotion, mindfulness, and positive organizational culture inputs create POB outcomes (Kinicki &