Criminal Justice Leadership

In criminal justice organizations, management and leadership are generally not considered synonymous with one another, yet they share some complimentary qualities as it relates to directing people or influencing them to complete tasks required of a common vision. The shared connection between management and leadership synthesize the overall goals of the closed system within law enforcement agencies to support the agency’s mission along with the shared mission of the criminal justice system in general. According to Allen & Sawhney (2015), management is charged with seeing to task completion and getting things done (p. 2). The roadmap to achieving the organization’s goals are coordinating, organizing, planning, evaluating efficiency and translating
Leadership and management tend to oppose one another in terms of needs. Leadership is tasked with recognizing when management in its quest to complete tasks, is hamstringing the organization with its actions, confront the problem, and institute change. Despite the differences in leadership and management, criminal justice organizations share many qualities. These shared qualities revolve around the unity of purpose of law enforcement encompassing upholding public safety through the agencies actions are the primary shared quality. While agencies do not perform the same tasks, or have the same structure, the purpose of public safety is paramount and is what binds the four primary components of the criminal justice system, police, corrections, probation, and security according to Allen & Sawhney (2015). The functions of each may be different, but through the interdependency binding the components together, the American criminal justice system diligently carries out its role in
According to Allen & Sawhney, (2015), most criminal justice agencies employ closed systems models focused on the internal organization’s views on its vision, values, and purpose. It seeks to establish stability through development of structured tasks that may be replicated repeatedly. In this manner, the outcome of the tasks allows for a reasonable amount of predictability (p. 27). Law enforcement agencies within the closed system work to discourage creativity and variation among low line level workers for the sake of maintaining uniformity. The paramilitary structure employed by law enforcement agencies, namely enforcement agencies, discourages worker input and productivity encouraging workers to perform the minimum amount of work required by supervision (Allen & Sawhney, 2015, p. 39). The hierarchical authority structure inhibits the ability to make decisions by those performing the work and instead concludes to procedural or higher level decisions by those who are not performing the work at the time. Closed systems models are not internally collaborative and while predictable, remain inefficient. The perspectives of these types of systems models are based on solid study of twentieth-century managerial systems. At the foundation are the principles of Taylor, the father of modern scientific management (Allen & Sawhney, p. 28). Taylor rooted in Taylorism