Ensuring service excellence by realising the full potential of police officials

Abstract

A new day has come for South Africa after the election of the first democratic government in Apri l 1994. Citizens of a country vote the government to power and i t is now for the government to live up to their election promises. Al l over the world the general public's perception of government is based on the nature and quality of the services i t receives from public servants. These public servants are the frontline service providers to the citizens of South Africa, the "face" of the government. The government published the Batho Pele White paper as an initiative, to improve the lives of the People of South Africa by transforming the public service. The government adopted a client-orientated approach and placed the citizen in the centre of service delivery. This great initiative has overshadowed the public servants and government neglected the unlocking of the ful l potential of these public servants who are responsible to keep Batho Pele initiative alive. An empirical research was conducted to determine a relationship between the level of unlocked potential of employees and the level of service delivery. The local community of Carletonville were requested to rate the service quality of the police officials working in the Community Service Centre (CSC) at Carletonville police station. The research revealed that the community has high expectations of these police officials and that there is a service gap due to these unmet expectations. A total of 37 CSC police officials were subjected to this research to determine their level of unlocked potential . It was revealed that the majority of these police officials' potential were unlocked potential , but was never managed due to lack of encouragement, support, recognition, active mentoring and coaching from their immediate supervisors/ commanders at the station management resulting poor service delivery to the local community. The study was concluded with a proposed model of the relationship between unlocked/ unleashed potential and the poor service delivery and recommendations to manage the unlocked potential of these police officials to improve service delivery to the local community of Carletonville.