Sustaining police officers’ motivation in aviation security Ismail Cenk Demirkol 1 & Mahesh K. Nalla 1 Received: 6 June 2017 /Accepted: 27 October 2017 /Published online: 2 November 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract The focus of the present study is airport police officers. The aim of this study is to examine factors that determine and shape airport police officers’ work motivation in the context of goal-setting theory advanced by Locke and Latham (1990a) to improve the effectiveness of airport security. More specifically, we ask whether goal difficulty and goal specificity influence officers’ motivation. Additionally, we seek to determine if goal commitment, task significance, self-efficacy, feedback, rewards, and participatively set goals have a positive effect on police officers’ motivation. The results indicate that goal difficulty, goal specificity, task significance, commitment, self-effi- cacy, and rewards are related to police officers’ sense of motivation. That is, the goal- setting model is a practical tool that increases motivational skills of airport police officers to bolster aviation security. Thus, this model is a good starting point for assisting airport police officers in their work context and offering important insights and implications, theoretically and practically, in the field of aviation security. Keywords Motivation . Goal-setting theory . Goal context . Goal commitment . Airport police officers Introduction Airports are a crucial component of the physical infrastructure of the airline industry as they provide shelter, services, and security to thousands of people and hundreds of aircrafts at a time. This feature establishes airports as soft targets for terrorist acts and J Transp Secur (2017) 10:171–187 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12198-017-0185-6 * Ismail Cenk Demirkol demirkol@msu.edu Mahesh K. Nalla nalla@msu.edu 1 School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, 560 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA