The U.S. Army faces a variety of challenges to maintain a ready and capable force into the future. Its missions are diverse, following a continuum from peace to war that includes combat and counterinsurgency operations as well as negotiation, reconstruction, and stability operations that require a variety of personnel and skill sets to execute. Missions often demand rapid decision making and coordination with others in novel ways, so that personnel are not simply following a specific set of tactical orders but, rather, carrying out mission command through an understanding of broader strategic goals in order to develop and choose among courses of action. Like any workforce, the Army is diverse in terms of demographic characteristics, such as gender and race, with a commitment of its leadership to ensure equal opportunities across all demographic parties. With these challenges comes the urgent need to better understand how contextual factors influence soldier and small unit behavior and mission performance.
Soldiers are embedded in several different contexts, each of which includes social and organizational factors. First is the context of their small unit: the team, squad, and platoon to which they are assigned. Second is the context of the larger Army organization, such as their battalion. Third is the context of their physical location and environment. They can be stationed with family (either in the United States or outside). They can be stationed on or off a military facility. They can be stationed in combat or noncombat environments. All these contexts can influence on how a soldier and his or her small unit operate.
Questions related to contextual factors have great bearing on issues of enduring concern to the military. For example, how do soldiers respond to
Army policy that seeks to change norms? How do organizational factors impact service members’ resilience and operational effectiveness in the face of environmental transitions? How can leaders influence the social interactions within their units to foster environments of productive behavior?
Hence, the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) asked the National Research Council to convene an interdisciplinary group of experts “to synthesize and assess basic research opportunities in the behavioral and social sciences related to social and organizational factors that comprise the context of individual and small unit behavior in military environments.” The study was to consider “tactical operations of small units and their leaders, to include the full spectrum of unique military environments.”
Based on a careful review and collation of data from a diverse array of sources, the committee arrived at three key points.
First, ARI should play a more active role in making data on actual Army units available, and it should provide access for behavioral and social science researchers who want to study basic scientific questions in actual Army contexts and with actual soldiers and their data. Like most definitions of “basic research,” ARI’s definition is predicated on the idea of developing fundamental knowledge of phenomena without specific application in process or products. Yet, this definition does not preclude research on active duty soldiers in real military contexts. Since basic research aimed at understanding the impact of social and organizational context necessitates studies situated in the relevant context, it is the committee’s opinion that allowing behavioral researchers access to active duty soldiers in military contexts is crucial. Furthermore, ARI should also facilitate access in order for researchers to integrate or synthesize data that have already been collected.
Recommendation 1
The committee strongly recommends that the Department of the Army support an appropriate mix of intramural and extramural basic scientific research on relevant Army personnel in military environments. The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) should be responsible for making appropriate data on Army units available and for promoting access for both internal and external behavioral researchers to study basic scientific questions in military contexts. ARI should increase its role as a facilitator or gateway for basic behavioral research in military contexts.
Second, a concerted research effort should be directed at developing unit-level measurements (in contrast to measures that aggregate individual-level assessments) of social and organizational factors. For example, methods should be developed to assign meaningful scores to a platoon
to summarize the effectiveness of troops’ understanding of leaders’ intent (lieutenant, sergeant), and leaders’ understanding of their troops’ readiness and motivation. Through the course of this study, several critical areas emerged as particularly relevant for understanding social and organizational factors in the current and future Army missions. To develop fundamental knowledge in these critical research areas, the committee’s recommendations call for ARI and other relevant U.S. military funding agencies to fund basic research that addresses questions related to norms, environmental transitions, contextual leadership, power and status hierarchies, and multiteam systems. Each area is presented in a separate chapter in this report as follows:
- How to understand the content, emergence, influence, and malleability of social norms (Chapter 2);
- How continual and repeated environmental transitions (e.g., deployments or reassignments) impact institutional routines and individual habits, with consequences for soldier resilience (Chapter 3);
- Contextual leadership, whereby leaders play a critical role in influencing the social context and thereby shape positive individual behavior and effective unit performance (Chapter 4);
- Status (e.g., informal processes of negotiating or obtaining respect and admiration from peers and subordinates) as an important source of influence in military units in addition to formal power, with substantial small unit performance implications (Chapter 5); and
- Multiteam systems, whereby personnel in military environments often work within teams of teams; including consideration of the potential benefits of developing unit-level measurements (in contrast to purely individual-level assessments) of the social variables critical to understanding the team-level and system-level domains (Chapter 6).
Third, the committee advocates the creation of a longitudinal database (Chapter 7) to include data collected from a probability sample of all recruits (with data providing a record of career paths and achievements for recruits from all backgrounds). The committee’s recommendation focuses on the demographic and administrative requirements for a probability sample appropriate for this longitudinal cohort study and also calls for the U.S. military to expand the demographic and socioeconomic information collected from potential recruits during the application process. The committee also calls for active efforts to promote research using data from the Millennium Cohort Study, Global Assessment Tool (through the Army’s
Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program), and other administrative records collected by the Department of Defense. The combined sets of data could provide a record of career paths and achievements for recruits from all backgrounds.
In addition, a new longitudinal survey, also described in Chapter 7, eliciting individual responses should be conducted periodically over the course of each soldier’s career (including time both in and out of the armed forces) to obtain more detailed information about beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. The specific questions to be surveyed would be determined by a working group of ARI staff and other relevant experts in survey research and empirical social science. The committee stresses the unique opportunity the Army has to answer some basic behavioral and social science research questions on who advances and why—given the special characteristics of Army careers, such as promotion from within the ranks and large numbers of well-defined, comparable personnel positions. Therefore, the committee’s final recommendation is a strong endorsement for creating and maintaining such a survey.
Recommendation 7.3
The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences should establish a working group of experts in survey research, empirical social science, and military subject matter charged with development of a new longitudinal survey strategy to track both individuals and small units over time.
The committee was also asked to comment on the level of funding necessary to implement the recommended research agenda. In lieu of providing a specific funding level, the committee offers guidance to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (see Chapter 1) when considering appropriate funding levels for ARI basic research over the next 10 or more years. If limitations on funding necessitate ARI having to choose between breadth and depth (i.e., small allocations of funding across all of the initiatives featured in the recommended research agenda versus larger funding allocations within a portion of the recommended initiatives), the committee believes that opting for depth over breadth would yield more valuable knowledge gains. This is based on the members’ collective research experience across several domains.
Rigorous research on the social and organizational factors that influence the behavior of soldiers and small units will contribute to the fundamental knowledge base needed to ensure that the U.S. Army can successfully address current and future challenges.