The military is a human
resource management arena of enormous challenge and complexity, comparable
to and even eclipsing the processes of big business. After all, military
leadership involves workforces (servicemen and women) which number
in the hundreds of thousands, spread over broad job types and geographies,
and involving considerable motivational and coordination challenges.
They require every type of HR process and intervention, from acquisition
to payment to training.
The United States Military
Academy at West Point prides itself on being one of the world’s
best training institutions for young officers. Their Corps of Cadets
currently numbers over 4,500, and each year the academy graduates
approximately 1000 cadets who become second lieutenants in the U.S.
Army. The academy must straddle ground between being an educational
and a workplace training institution, as it must produce ready officers.
West Point is no middling
institution – it stands on its own as a significant training
body. U.S. News & World Report have
in past years lauded it as the Best Public Liberal Arts College in
the country, Forbes.com recently pronounced West Point as the Best
Public College or University in America for undergraduate education
(#7 on the Forbes list of “America’s Top Colleges for
2013”), and The Princeton Review nominated it as one of the
100 Best Value Colleges for 2009. All cadets receive a Bachelor of
Science degree, and are fully prepared to meet the intellectual requirements
of a leader in today's U.S. Army.
Selection into such
a program is a crucial part of the process: after all, the academy
must preselect people whom they already believe to have the potential
to be good officers, and who will be able to handle the strenuous
combination of high-class academic as well as military training.
Psychological assessments
help in such a selection challenge, and are also used extensively
in the corporate world. With this in mind, Bartone, Eid, Johnsen,
Laberg and Snook (2009) undertook a study among West Point cadets
to investigate various psychological predictors of “leader
performance.”
Specifically, the study
evaluated the influence of psychological hardiness, social judgment,
and the “Big Five” personality dimensions (neuroticism,
extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) on leader
performance. They studied cadets in two different contexts: summer
field training (the military training component of the program) and
academic study. Supervisor ratings of leader performance, aggregated
over four years, were the outcome of interest.
The study employed a
statistical technique called regression, which we will study in this
chapter. After taking into account differences due to general intellectual
abilities, the results showed that cadets who are more extroverted,
more hardy, and who had a trend for a variable called ‘social
judgment’ (see the original article for a definition), performed
better in the summer field training environment. In the context of
academic study, more successful cadets were those showing traits such
as conscientiousness and hardiness. Certain other psychological traits
that we might think predict officer performance, such as openness,
did not seem to have an impact.
How can the academy
use the results? First, they can pretest applicants on these characteristics,
and use the results to help them select cadets. Secondly, they might
tailor individual development of cadets by identifying personality
issues that could undermine potential in the various areas, and attempt
to help the person overcome these issues.
In this case, we saw
an outcome variable that corresponds with operational outcomes, and
predictors that lie within individuals. The skills that enable the
analyst to link variables in this way are of use in a great number
of HR situations. The regression technique is used in thousands of
ways throughout the business world.