Abstract
The social construction of client service impacts on the everyday lives of all
community members. This qualitative study was conducted to establish how frontline
employees construct their client service in the police environment. Front-line
employees, such as police officers and civilians working for the police, were
interviewed in seven focus group discussions, and afterwards during in-depth
interviews on a one-on-one basis. Data was also collected by studying unsolicited
organisational documents such as policies and internal correspondence. I
contributed by writing an essay on my personal experiences while working for the
police service. Grounded theory was applied to analyse data through open, axial and
selective coding. Twenty-one themes emerged from the data during open coding.
Data was put back together again to find alternative links in the data. Eight main
themes that could be tied to "dissatisfaction in the organisation" emerged from the
data by applying this axial-coding process. Finding the single story line that could
drape all themes saw the emergence of the core category. This process of selective
coding identified the core category as being "dissatisfaction with internal processes
in the organisation". A literature review covered topics such as motivation,
commitment, policy, organisational culture, resistance to change and willingness.
This process facilitated the development of my version or interpretation of a
Process Satisfaction Model (PSM) which has been explicated in terms of the
conditional matrix. The "goodness" of the study was evaluated in terms of reflexivity,
peer debriefing, audit trail, credibility and dependability, authenticity, transferability
and member checking. The main contribution of the study is to the social science in
terms of theory and methodology and organisational human resource and
management practice. Practical value was added to mainly policy formulation,
implementation and accountability and education, training and development (ETD)
practice. The study was concluded by reflecting on the researcher’s experience of
the study during the course of the research.
Prof. Willem J. Schurink
Prof. Karel Stanz