Well-being and resilience in the police have garnered much attention among academics and policymakers. For police leaders, their personal resilience and the well-being of their staff is increasingly recognised as fundamental to successful organisational performance. In this chapter, we problematise the conventional rhetoric of well-being and resilience in the police through an analysis of the steadfast attachment to ‘heroism’ in leadership. We argue that the introduction of well-being policy is difficult in a police occupational culture that prioritises romanticised and idealised versions of leadership. The chapter begins with a critical consideration of the stress literature, followed by an overview of the ‘romance of leadership’ thesis. We emphasise the problematic consequences of the contemporary well-being and resilience rhetoric for both individuals and organisations, and argue that such rhetoric reinforces unhelpful and regressive notions of heroism in police leadership. The final part of this chapter considers the challenges for police leadership in adopting alternative ‘post-heroic’ forms of leadership, and makes recommendations for future practice.
There is an established interest in the nature of stress in policing. This body of work explores assumptions about police work as inherently stressful, and more stressful than other occupations, and examines the negative effects of stress experienced by the police, as well as the relationship between stress and police occupational culture (Brown and Campbell, 1994; Chan, 2007b). In understanding the nature of stress in policing, Stinchcomb (2004) distinguishes between episodic stressors and chronic organisational stressors. Episodic stressors refer to the traumatic aspects of policing and the emotional and psychological strains of police work, which are not necessarily regularly encountered by police officers.
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