In this chapter we discuss how people try to achieve work-life balance and maintain an acceptable level of life satisfaction by reducing role conflict. Reducing role conflict is typically operationalized by (1) matching role resources with role demands, (2) managing time, and (3) managing stress. We also discuss intervention programs that organizations can use to help their employees achieve greater work-life balance through managing role conflict.

This chapter describes a personal intervention of work-life balance referred to as whole-life perspective — an approach to decision-making that considers possible consequences in work and nonwork life domains. The whole-life perspective in decision-making is implemented in terms of (1) evoking multiple identities in work-life decisions, (2) framing work-life decisions broadly, and (3) applying broadened rules to guide work-life decisions. We also discuss how instructors can use these three whole-life perspective principles to train employees to achieve greater work-life balance.

In this chapter we discuss role enrichment as a behavior-based personal intervention to achieve work-life balance and enhance life satisfaction. Employees can enrich their roles by transferring their skills, psychological capital, and social capital from one role to the next in work and nonwork domains. We also discuss intervention programs that organizations can institutionalize to achieve higher levels of employee work-life balance through role enrichment.

In this chapter we discuss another behavior-based personal intervention, namely role balance. Role balance involves engaging in balanced activities— balanced between maintenance activities (those designed to maintain role functioning and meet basic needs) and flourishing activities (those designed to allow the individual to meet growth needs). Specifically, we describe some maintenance and flourishing activities that are essential to creating role balance in work life and nonwork domains (e.g., family life, health and safety, love life, financial life, social life, leisure life, and cultural life). We then discuss how instructors can implement the role balance principle in workshops designed to train employees how to increase work-life balance.

In this chapter, we discuss various definitions along with key characteristics of work-life balance. Work-life balance is defined from at least five perspectives: (1) equal engagement and satisfaction in work and nonwork domains, (2) engagement in work and nonwork roles compatible with life goals, (3) successful accomplishment of goals in work and nonwork domains, (4) full engagement in multiple life domains, and (5) minimal role conflict between work and nonwork life domains.

Let us be clear from the start. I am not, nor ever have been, a police officer or indeed even been directly employed by any police service. This book therefore neither comprises a collection of war stories from experiences on the front line, nor provides a prescriptive list of how officers should behave in certain situations. It does, however, bring applied research which I (and colleagues) have conducted in crime and policing over the past two decades, into one convenient book.

I hope that this book will not be perceived as having been written by a patronising academic, as that really was not my intention. In fact, any egg-sucking caused (to grannies or anyone else) by reading this book, was completely unintended and please accept my sincere apologies if it comes across so.

If the often trotted-out opinion that it takes five years for a police officer to acquire the knowledge and experience needed to be a police officer (provenance unknown) rings true in any way, this book will hopefully make a contribution to the expediting of both, by presenting practical examples of how a little psychological knowledge and research can be applied in policing.

Although this book was principally written with those new to policing in mind, both newly ‘sworn’ ‘front-line’ police officers and police staff (such as those working in prevention or supporting criminal investigations), more ‘experienced’ readers or those familiar with academic research in this area will hopefully also take some learning or ideas from it.

This book represents my take on how an introduction to how some psychological research and theory can be used to inform various policing tasks (and vice-versa). The first aim is to demonstrate how a little knowledge of psychology can be used in the understanding and practice of policing; namely, its application for the policing tasks of crime prevention, street patrols, and criminal investigation. Although the psychological research drawn on here and applied to such policing tasks is arguably limited, one hopes that this book in some way will act as a catalyst for the production of further books focusing on how psychology can be used in other aspects of policing, such as cybercrime and counter-terrorism policing.

Introduction

If, like me, you have never seen the point of the last chapter of a book merely summarising (that is, basically repeating) the chapters that have gone before, then rest assured that it is not happening here. This chapter is therefore short, to encourage the reader to get the impression that this book is more of a beginning than an end, more of a work in progress than fait accompli. If achieved, then it is hoped it will ether provoke or stimulate further thought as to where the relationship between psychological research and knowledge and policing might need to focus and develop in the future.

Hopefully, having now convinced the reader of the valuable contribution that psychology has and can make in the future – for example, regarding advancements in the interviewing of suspects and witnesses, the enhancing of investigative decision-making, and with the prevention of crime – how the relationship between both might be advanced is the obvious next question. I am not so conceited as to think that I alone possess a metaphorical roadmap for how any relationship needs to go, I merely intend to make some suggestions for likely areas where it might wish to stop off on the journey.

‘The dating game’: in search of the ideal relationship between police and academic researchers

The only advice that I ever give when anybody asks me about their ‘relationships’ or for that matter any ‘affairs of the heart’ is, first, not to ask for any such advice in the first place, and second, not to offer any advice about such matters under any circumstances. Unless that is you are particularly adept at negotiating your way through ‘emotional minefields’. In my experience at least, that way disaster lies, particularly in the shape of an angry friend with whom you agreed that indeed their relationship was over, but which turns out several months later, not to be the case.

Any advice given here is solely meant to foster and forge productive relationships between police and academics, so that the chances of me being held responsible for any emotional car crash that might ensue are minimal enough to make it a rare exception.

Introduction

One of the most obvious spaces where psychology and policing interact is the issue of maintaining police and police staff wellbeing. Attending dangerous and/or emotionally charged situations, for example, is often part and parcel of policing, with many police exposed to ever-changing cocktails of risky and potentially traumatic events, on a daily basis. Put simply, ‘it comes with the job’. This raises two primary questions for this chapter:

• 1. how can knowledge gleaned from psychological research help us to identify the common pressures and stressors on the wellbeing of those working in policing (for example, emotional, psychological, and physical effects); and

• 2. how can this be best translated into appropriate support to help those working in policing maintain a good level of personal wellbeing?

What appears unfathomable, at least until relatively recently, has been the lack of academic research on police wellbeing, despite the unequivocal acceptance that policing is (1) often a dangerous, risky, challenging, and difficult arena within which to work, and therefore (2) those who do so are exposed to potentially traumatic and emotionally charged events on a daily basis. Despite the formal creation of police services in the UK some 200 years ago, it is only in the last few years that police wellbeing has become a popular focus for academic research. Indeed, research in this area is still at best considered to be ‘emergent’. In terms of information and wellbeing support guidance and support available to UK police and police staff, the Oscar Kilo (OK) website developed and maintained by the National Police Wellbeing Service is a shining beacon.

To date, most of the research literature pertaining to the effects on police staff has tended to focus on ‘front-line’ policing (that is, more on ‘mainstream policing functions’, such as street patrols), perhaps failing to recognise that modern policing is an occupation comprising thousands of different roles, situations, contexts, and responsibilities (Cartwright and Roach, 2021b). As a defence, as with anything else, the research had to start somewhere, and until recently it could be argued that consequently the wellbeing challenges and needs of police and police staff involved in very different policing roles and functions has been overlooked at the expense of a generalisation on ‘policing’ as a homogenous phenomenon.