Building resilience: a case study of occupational factors influencing levels of ‘happiness’ for Abu Dhabi police officers

Abstract

Abstract The policing and security community globally is in a race against time to develop strategies for improving mental health well-being amongst the profession. For professionals across the multiple contributing areas supporting police officer well-being, i.e. medical practitioners, psychologists, management professionals, mentors, coaches, counsellors, understanding contributing factors from the experience, and perception of police officers is a critical contributing area of research (Baker et al., 2020; Deschênes et al., 2018. Psychosocial factors linked to the occupational psychological health of police officers: preliminary study. Cogent Psychology 5(1): 1426271; Purba and Demou, 2019. The relationship between organisational stressors and mental wellbeing within police officers: a systematic review. BMC Public Health 19(1): 1286) The aim of the study reported in this paper was to evaluate the influence of work factors of organizational rewards, job characteristics, and factors relating to working in a public service agency on an officer’s perception of happiness. A survey was distributed to police officers in the Abu Dhabi police force, with an inferential analysis conducted to examine the relationships between work factors and levels of officer happiness. The findings identified employee perception of organizational rewards, job control, task significance, frequency of feedback, desire for helping others as primary reasons to work in the police, and opportunities available to help others in society were all predictors of police happiness. This article discusses specifically the employees’ perception of rewards at work and job characteristics as determinants of happiness. The findings contributing to development of future organizational response for enhancing officer well-being and importantly inform in building resilience to mental health illness for police officers.