Job Burnout and Psychological Empowerment among Police in Mainland China

To date, the attitudes of civil servants in China have transformed from taking command and free from media or institutional oversight to being under the scrutiny of the media and receiving inspection from disciplinary inspection and supervision offices, and serving the public. In particular, police officers' job duties include the characteristics of high stress, high-pressure, and high-risk, which are not found in ordinary civil servants. The numbers of Chinese police officers per 10,000 populations are remarkably lower than in other countries: 30.01 in the United States, 34.67 in Britain, 122.46 in Russia, but only 11.00 in mainland China. These show that police force in mainland China has been burdened with a heavy workload (1). Unfortunately, studies on job burnout in police forces have been rarely reported, even though the symptoms of job burnout have become significant in the police forces. The management of police forces in China follows the top-down principle. Although this management system ensures unified policies and decrees and centralized power, which are conducive to implementing command, the hierarchical top-down management can easily result in lack of enthusiasm and initiative among the subordinates in police force. Thomas and Velthouse indicated that psychological empower-ment was an individually experienced psychological status or a cognitive complex, which included four cognitive components: meaning, sense of competence or self-efficacy, self-determination, and impact (2). However, the research subjects of most empirical studies of psychological empower-ment were usually nursing staff and teachers but not police officers (3, 4). Nevertheless, only few empirical studies have been reported in China. Importantly, no report has examined the job burnout from psychological empowerment perspective. The present study method is cross-sectional-analytical and sampling was conducted among the police force in mainland China, and 363 valid questionnaires were received. We measured burnout using 15-item Chinese edition of Job Burnout Inventory, and psychological empowerment using 12-item Speritzer Psychological Empowerment(5). Descriptive analysis, univariate analysis to evaluate association with higher score of burnout, and mul-tivariate logistic regression analysis to predict high burnout in psychological empowerment was performed. Findings showed that 223 persons (61.4% of the 363 valid questionnaires) reported symptoms job burnout, the detection rate of police officers with mild, moderate and severe burnout are 30.9%, 27.3%, and 3.3%. The detection rate of the police officers exhibited emotional exhaustion, deper-sonalization and reduced personal accomplishment are 14.3%, 41.6% and 39.4%.The mean scores for j emotional exhaustion, depersonali