The Mediating Effect of Resilience on the Impact of Police Officers' Job Engagement on Disaster Response Capacity

Modern society faces many forms of disasters, not just emerging viral infectious diseases like COVID-19. These disasters not only cause huge losses in human and material resources, but also cause social disruption. Effective disaster response is an essential part of protecting society and its people, and the role of police officers is pivotal in this process. Police officers are directly involved in maintaining order, saving lives, and recovering from disasters during the initial response phase, so their response capabilities have a direct impact on the effectiveness of disaster management. In this context, it can be argued that police officer engagement plays a key role in enhancing disaster response capacity. To further understand the relationship between job commitment and disaster response capacity, it is also necessary to consider the internal factors of individuals. In this study, we propose resilience as such an internal factor and explore its mediating effect to enhance the effectiveness of the police role in disaster situations. The results of the analysis showed that job commitment (=.66, p<.001) was positively significant as a result of the significance test of the effect of the independent variable on the mediating variable. On the other hand, the results of the significance test of the effects of independent variables and parameters on the dependent variable showed that job commitment (=.29, p<.001) had a significant effect on disaster response capability, and the parameter resilience also had a significant effect on disaster response capability (=.33, p<.001). The results suggest that police officers' job engagement directly enhances their disaster response capabilities and that resilience partially influences this relationship. This suggests that police officers with higher job commitment have the ability to respond more effectively in disaster situations. These findings suggest that programs that promote resilience in police organizations can enhance job commitment, which in turn can improve the disaster response capabilities of police officers. Therefore, police organizations should consider implementing a variety of training and support programs to enhance resilience in addition to strategies to increase job engagement.