The impact of emotional labor of petition police officers on turnover intention: Focusing on the moderating effect of sense of vocational calling

This study seeks to empirically verify the effect of petition police officers' emotional labor on turnover intention. Petition police officers are in charge of security work at important national facilities, but their job involves serious emotional labor due to malicious complaints. Emotional labor has been confirmed in previous studies to have an effect on turnover intention. However, petition police officers perform the duties of police officers under the Police Officers' Duties Act to the extent necessary for the purpose of security only in the security area. For petition police officers, the sense of professional calling of being responsible for the security of important national facilities is considered important. Therefore, this study aims to verify the moderating effect of a sense of vocational calling on the emotional labor and turnover intention of petitioning police officers. To achieve this research objective, a total of 132 questionnaires were surveyed targeting police officers in Incheon and the northern Gyeonggi region and used for analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was confirmed that petition police officers' high emotional labor had a positive (+) effect on turnover intention. It was confirmed that the interaction term between petition police officers' emotional labor and sense of vocational calling had a buffering effect on turnover intention. In other words, the high emotional labor that petition police officers have while performing their duties reduces their intention to change jobs due to their sense of professional calling in being responsible for the security of important national facilities. Based on these analysis results, policy suggestions and future research directions regarding the sense of professional calling of petition police officers were presented.