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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
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3


Environmental Transitions

People are creatures of habit. Life transitions—whether to a different city, a different organization, or even a different job within an organization—can be disorienting and undermine performance and health. U.S. military personnel in the 21st century face transitions on a scale unprecedented in other aspects of life, even when compared with soldiers just a decade ago. Attending to the impact of transitions will allow the Army to assess a variety of questions, such as:

  • What personal (e.g., personality traits, beliefs, and habits) and organizational (e.g., organizational structures and routines) characteristics increase service members’ resilience and operational effectiveness in the face of transitions?
  • Are there ways to instill service members with certain habits during training so that they can more seamlessly transition between one environment and the next?
  • What is known about the formation of habits that are functional in one environment but dysfunctional in another? How can habits be deactivated upon transition to an environment in which they are no longer functional? Can one deactivate individual habits that were learned and functional in one environmental context but are dysfunctional in another?
  • Can advanced simulation technology be informed by, and help inform, a science-based understanding of how transitions and contextual cues interact with learning and performance?
Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
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  • How do personal and organizational characteristics interact with each other to determine a unit’s operational effectiveness?

While soldiers who opt for full 20-year (or more) military careers may enjoy a sense of stability from a career trajectory within a single large organization with well-defined career paths and promotion processes, many other factors conspire to make military careers extremely unsettled. Military downsizing, attrition, increased mission tempo, relocations through deployments and permanent changes of station, continually morphing units, and new communication and transportation technology both enable and incentivize military leaders to demand unmatched flexibility, adaptability, and mobility from today’s soldiers. Unfortunately, increasing the pace of life transitions can come at a high psychological and physical cost (see, e.g., Pincus et al., 2001). Understanding how to mitigate these negative consequences while retaining their benefits is a basic research challenge for the military.

A soldier’s life is punctuated with transitions. With the nation currently engaged in multiple conflicts and other military operations across the globe, a soldier’s career is organized into a series of permanent duty station moves and temporary deployments wherein soldiers are moved from home station to a position of readiness to engage or support military operations. Even a single deployment can involve multiple transitions. For example, Pincus and colleagues (2001) define five stages of deployment (predeployment, deployment, sustainment, redeployment, and postdeployment), with each stage characterized by different cognitive, social, and emotional challenges for soldiers and their families.

While the psychological and physical costs of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade have received much public attention, other significant environmental transitions are experienced by soldiers around the world. For example, a paper on Army teams prepared for the committee by Captain Andrew Miller (former U.S. Army)1 describes the author’s experience during a 365-day assignment to the Republic of Korea beginning in 2006: “The arrival and departure processing takes 1-2 weeks on each end of the tour due to mandatory briefings, classes, paperwork, appointments, doctor visits, packing/load personal property, etc. Factor in as well the mid-tour leave (up to 30 days normally) that soldiers take, and a billet ‘filled’ for 12 months might only be functional for 9 to 10 of those months” (p. 16). Furthermore, in Miller’s experience and consistent with other military service members who spoke with the committee, even expected transitions can suddenly take an unexpected direction. For example, Miller describes a circumstance in which soldiers stationed in Korea

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1Paper available by request from this study’s public access file.

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

(who have the expectation of being exempt from deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan during this tour) were deployed to Iraq: “All soldiers assigned to the brigade deployed, to include soldiers departing Korea in less than 2 weeks” (p. 17). Miller notes that soldiers assigned to this brigade in Korea were rarely accompanied by spouses or family, and dependents were not authorized by the Army. Consequently, “soldiers endured ‘back to back’ deployments away from their families, not counting their 10 days of leave shoehorned into deployment wrap-up” (p. 17). The committee can imagine severe psychological implications on soldiers separated from their loved ones and expecting to transition home within a few weeks or months, only to find themselves deployed to a war zone for the next year.2

Each of these transitions can undermine unit effectiveness and undermine the performance and health of individual soldiers. For example, data show that “[s]oldiers are particularly vulnerable to becoming a fatality within the first three months of deployment” with almost 40 percent of fatalities occurring during this time (Plank et al., 2010, p. 2,299). Subsequent data have shown that one-half of the injuries sustained by a Marine infantry battalion occurred within the first 50 days of its deployment to Afghanistan (Phillips et al., 2013). Furthermore, the effects of deployment do not end when soldiers return home. After transitioning back from deployment, soldiers often exhibit anger, alienation, and unhealthy behaviors. For example, postdeployment soldiers show more risk-taking (e.g., unsafe driving or unprotected sex) and more unhealthy habits (e.g., eating junk food or drinking alcohol), even when controlling for the well-documented increase in posttraumatic stress (PTS) following deployment (Adler et al., 2011b). It has also been shown that multiple deployments can compound these effects. For example, previously deployed soldiers were found to be three times as likely to screen positive for PTS and major depression and 90 percent more likely to score below the general population norm on physical functioning as soldiers with no previous deployments (Kline et al., 2010).

Given that the factors driving the pace of transitions within the military are unlikely to disappear (and indeed, they seem to be increasing in

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2The committee recognizes that drastic changes to expected transitions such as that described by Miller are not experienced by all soldiers, and in fact, the Army has gone to great length to establish clear expectations for regular and repeated transitions. Specifically, the Army Force Generation regulation usually provides a level of predictability to the process of unit formation, training, and assignments. It regulates a 3-year cycle of designating cohorts of soldiers and leaders within units, in order to establish cycles of (1) arriving to a unit at generally the same time in order to develop as a cohesive team through training in the first year, (2) availability for worldwide deployment in the second year, and (3) time available for necessary recovery and subsequent relocation to a new duty station in the third year (see Department of the Army, 2011).

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

prevalence in the general population as well), it is crucial that research uncover the mechanisms underlying the negative consequences associated with transitions and suggest interventions to preempt or repair them. From this perspective, it is useful to distinguish local/specific consequences of transitions from more global/generic consequences. In the former type of consequence, when an individual or team transitions from one specific environment to another, the transition can have consequences that are associated particularly with the environments transferred to, from, or both. For example, when a soldier transitions from home station to deployment, old adaptive behaviors (e.g., regular healthy meals and portion sizes) may fall away and new adaptive behaviors (e.g., vigilance) may not be sufficiently activated. In the latter type of transition consequence, simply the act of making a transition (any transition) can undermine operational effectiveness and health, for example, by increasing stress. Local and global consequences clearly interact. For example, the disruption of healthy habits may partly explain why transitions increase stress. In this chapter, the committee reviews research that addresses both local and global consequences of military transitions, and we offer specific recommendations for a basic research agenda to advance the state of knowledge in these areas.

STATE OF RESEARCH ON TRANSITION CONSEQUENCES

Although people are creatures of habit, they frequently confront change. Several lines of research have examined how individuals and organizations respond to such changes. Although primarily developed in civilian contexts, this research has relevance to many of the issues confronted by soldiers and military organizations; indeed, it is already informing current military practices for reducing the challenges of transition, at least with respect to individuals’ mental health (see, for example, Cornum et al., 2011). This research provides a solid foundation for a “science of transitions,” but it speaks only indirectly to the full range of challenges confronted by military transitions and the consequences these have for both the individual and the organization. Here we outline the current state of this research as well as promising directions to enhance its relevance for military challenges.

Local and Specific Effects of Transitions (The Role of Habit and Routine)

When an individual or small unit transitions from one environment to another, the transition can create immediate and specific consequences. Well-honed skills and routines may fail to transfer to the new situation. On the other hand, behaviors that serve the individual well in one context (e.g., hypervigilance on the battlefield) might persist into a new context where they are no longer adaptive (e.g., hypervigilance at home with family,

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

postdeployment). A large body of research, highlighted below, has documented the context specificity of human decision making and the challenges this presents when individuals and organizations must transition to new circumstances. Research has also examined the mechanisms underlying these effects, emphasizing that, when situations are stable, decisions and behaviors become automatized, which allows for efficient decision making, frees up cognitive effort for other areas, and is arguably a necessary property of effective decision making in general (Bargh and Chartrand, 1999; Gigerenzer and Goldstein, 1996), even if it creates difficulties when transitioning across stable situations. In contrast, there is a paucity of research on how to mitigate these consequences of environmental shifts when change becomes the norm.

The notion that individuals (Wood et al., 2005), organizations (Becker, 2004), and even whole economies (Nelson and Winter, 1982) organize their activities around regular patterns of behavior, each of which “is followed repeatedly, but is subject to change if conditions change” (Winter, 1964, p. 263) has a rich tradition across the behavioral sciences (see Chapter 2 discussion of norms as regular patterns of behavior). When the individual is the unit of analysis, these patterns are typically referred to as habits. When the organization is the unit of analysis, these patterns are called routines. In either case, the patterns are defined by several generally accepted characteristics: (1) they repeat; (2) they are “automatic” in the sense that people follow them with little conscious attention and they do not require substantial cognitive resources (Kahneman, 2003; Simon, 1982);3 (3) they are context dependent, meaning they are only evoked within specific situations, locations, or relationships (see, e.g., Kahneman and Miller, 1986); and (4) these default habits and routines are resistant to change (March and Simon, 1958).

For example, at the individual level, habits can be seen as a behavioral manifestation of the status quo bias—a preference for the current set of behaviors rather than making a change. Preference for the status quo has been explained as the reference point against which change is measured, and since losses are more psychologically salient than gains (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), the potential loss from change becomes more salient than the potential gain from change, creating a preference for whatever is currently in play (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988). A related notion is regret avoidance: since people experience greater regret for action than for inaction (Kahneman et al., 1982), they will tend to choose the status

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3However, in the context of organizational research, some have argued that routines are “effortful accomplishments” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003) that require thought and improvisation in that, at least at the organizational level, contexts are too varied to allow automaticity in the traditional sense.

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

quo—doing what they have always done. There is also evidence for an existence bias (Eidelman and Crandall, 2012): simply having an existing habit suggests that the habit is a good one. This bias is reminiscent of the adage credited to Bert Lance, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Similarly, at the organizational level, practices, routines, and strategies tend to become institutionalized such that organizations reduce search activities aimed at identifying innovative practices (Lant, 1992; March and Simon, 1958). These institutionalized routines are sticky, in the sense that only in the face of large organizational failures do people question their existence (Cyert and March, 1963). Failure motivates organizations to increase their search activities and to accept new practices that differ from their existing routines—“non-local” search (Levinthal and March, 1981)—thus allowing for new routines and practices (March, 1981). These characteristics of habits and routines (automatic, contextually generated but sticky) explain their central relevance to transitions research. (See also the discussion in Chapter 4 of the role new soldiers play in changing small-group dynamics.)

Transitioning from one environment to another threatens the viability of old habits and routines. First, old habits and routines can persist in new situations where they are meaningless and/or unproductive, in that they can be conditioned on irrelevant contextual features that persist in this new situation (Grant, 1996). Second, beneficial habits and routines can extinguish as people become removed from their original context—for instance, habits associated with particular times, environments, moods, or group members (Bower and Forgas, 2000; Wood et al., 2005). From this perspective, transitions serve to disrupt the stimulus cues that trigger routinized behavior (Wood et al., 2005). Transitions can eliminate certain cues for adaptive behaviors, such as training or exercise, such that these behaviors are no longer automatically cued and must fall back on effortful intentional control before they can become routinized in the new context. Conversely, cues for automatic behavior may be present in the new context, yet the behavior itself may no longer be adaptive (such as hypervigilance responses to loud noises when back at home station).

Although most research has focused on the negative consequences of transitions, they create positive opportunities as well. For example, individuals more easily adopt beneficial habits following environmental transition, at least when strong internal or organizational values help motivate the desire for behavior change (Verplanken et al., 2008; see also Chapter 2).

Although the mechanisms underlying habits and routines are reasonably well understood, research is still needed on how to mitigate the negative consequences and exploit the opportunities of habitual reasoning in the face of repetitive change. Several gaps in the literature limit the military’s

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

(and organizations more generally) ability to translate findings on habits into beneficial practices to manage their effects.

At a basic level, research is needed simply to document and classify the most common habits and routines that are impacted by environmental transitions and the nature of this impact. For example, which classes of beneficial habits are typically disrupted or enhanced when moving to a new environment? Which classes inappropriately persist into the new environment? Which maladaptive habits should be targeted for extinction in the context of a transition?

Then, for each of these classes of behavior, what theoretical findings can inform decisions on how to select, train, or organize personnel to maximize the benefit and minimize the harm that arises from these phenomena? For example, the fact that transitions can disrupt “good” behavior suggests the need for more extensive research on the types of cues upon which such behaviors are conditioned and on whether techniques or organizational practices exist that help preserve these cues across contexts. To the extent that different contexts require different habits, research is required to understand how to contextualize these behaviors more appropriately. For example, should they be contextualized through improved alignment of the contextual elicitors of habits and routines with the contexts where they are needed, through training simulations that allow people to practice transitions, or through metacognitive skills that make individuals more aware of the determinants of their behavior?

Finally, in that military routines and habits are often established in facsimiles of the operational environment (e.g., roleplaying exercise and, increasingly, computer simulations), more research is needed to ensure these simulations are informed by a science-based understanding of how transitions and contextual cues interact with learning and performance. An oft-stated goal underlying the development of such simulations is that they should replicate all aspects of the physical, social, and emotional context with perfect fidelity to facilitate learning transfer. While laudable, this goal is unattainable for the foreseeable future, given the current state of the art in modeling human behavior (e.g., see National Research Council, 2008a, 2008b). Rather, the committee believes that simulation methods and technologies need to be informed by a better understanding of the key sensory and situational cues that trigger and reinforce desirable soldier behavior within military contexts. For instance, rather than focusing on improving all aspects of simulation fidelity, fidelity should be prioritized by an understanding of which cues are minimally necessary to ensure that appropriate habits and routines are elicited in the actual operational environment. In addressing these research questions, simulation technology may actually serve as an important methodological tool to advance science-based understanding of how transitions and contextual cues interact with learning. For

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

example, in that simulation technology allows a researcher to systematically manipulate levels of fidelity (the degree to which the simulation duplicates a real military environment) and the presence or absence of contextual cues, it can serve as a powerful tool for empirical research on habits and routines.

In summary, further research on the local and specific effects of transitions could help to address the following questions:

  • Which desirable individual habits or organizational routines, especially those prevalent within military contexts, interact poorly with transitions?
  • What theories explain how individuals and groups deactivate habits that were learned and functional in one context but are dysfunctional in another context?
  • Are there ways to instill service members with certain desirable habits during training so that they can more seamlessly transition between one context and the next; if not, are there efficient ways to recontextualize or reactivate the desirable habits in a new context?
  • What individual habits transcend context in providing a positive benefit in multiple environments? How can organizational routines be used to prime and reinforce these habits? For example, can such habits be preserved by reinforcing strong organizational values that are made salient across contexts and that reinforce the desired habits?
  • How can interdisciplinary partnerships between advanced training technology (e.g., virtual reality) and theories on routines and habits be established to further research and improve training? For instance, can virtual technology be used as a methodological tool to study the contextualization of habits, with the results from such studies used to inform the design of training systems with an improved theoretical understanding of the contextual nature of habits and routines?

Global and Generic Effects of Transitions (the Role of Resilience)

Whereas research on routines and habits emphasizes the local and specific negative consequences of environmental transitions, other research has emphasized that the mere occurrence of transitions, especially repeated transitions, can produce broad and generalized deficits to individual and organizational performance (see, for example, Kline et al., 2010). And whereas research on local consequences emphasizes the importance of repeated patterns of behavior, research on the global consequences of change emphasizes the role of stress (Cornum et al., 2011). From this perspective, change acts as a stressor that ultimately breaks down the

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

integrity of individuals and organizations. Essentially, transitions serve as psychological “shocks” that can drain physical and mental health and lead to psychological distress (e.g., PTS), maladaptive behaviors (e.g., sexual assault), long-term health effects, and organizational dysfunction (Kline et al., 2010).

Although the bulk of past research, especially as it relates to individuals, has focused on treatment (for example, developing improved screening instruments for pathology and improved therapeutic regimens) that repairs the consequences of these shocks, a more recent line of research has begun to emphasize a proactive, prevention-based approach known as promoting psychological resilience (Peterson, 2006; Luthar et al., 2000). Rather than focusing strictly on pathology, this alternative emphasizes individual and organizational strengths that inoculate individuals against the negative effects of stress.

The concept of psychological resilience, which occurs across a range of fields in the behavioral sciences, arose as a way of explaining why similar environmental stressors had very different consequences for different individuals. In trauma research, the construct of resilience is used to explain why some individuals are able to thrive in the face of traumatic stress or adverse conditions that overwhelm most others (Peterson, 2006). Within developmental psychology, resilience was evoked to explain why some children developed normally even in the presence of environmental stressors such as extreme poverty (e.g., Fraser, 1997). In research on organizations, a construct similar to resilience, psychological capital, is used to describe why groups and institutions thrive in the face of adversity (Luthans et al., 2007). What is common across these perspectives is a focus on identifying cognitive, social, and emotional characteristics of individuals that enable them to thrive and flourish in the face of stress (Fredrickson, 2003). There is also convergence with regard to the factors that predict resilience, including the role of positive emotions, the role of individual abilities such as coping skills, and the importance of positive institutions and social relationships (e.g., Cacioppo et al., 2011).

Resilience is already a focus of Department of Defense research and practice (for recent reviews see Adler et al., 2011a; Meredith et al., 2011). For example, the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program is informed by resilience research and claims the stress of transitions can be mitigated by inculcating emotional, social, family, and spiritual fitness (Algoe and Fredrickson, 2011; Cornum et al., 2011). This program attempts to buffer the global impact of transitions by teaching soldiers various skills and techniques to improve resilience (Cornum et al., 2011). Key elements of the program include periodic assessments of soldier resilience through a self-reported instrument known as the Global Assessment Tool (Peterson et al., 2011), universal resilience training, training “master

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

resilience trainers,” follow-up and periodic reassessment, and tracking of resilience throughout the career of Army personnel. Several Army-funded studies have attempted to assess soldier fitness and examine how this changes across broad transitions such as predeployment to deployment and subsequently to postdeployment (Park, 2012).

The Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program is just one of many attempts to incorporate resilience concepts within military organizations. For example, a recent RAND report reviewed 23 Department of Defense programs that promote psychological resilience among service members (Meredith et al., 2011). This report emphasized that, although there is scientific evidence that resilience-related factors improve resilience to stress (especially individual-level factors such as positive thinking, positive affect, positive coping, realism, and behavioral control), there is far less evidence that resilience-enhancing programs are effective in military contexts. Thus, effective ways to translate these research findings remain an active research challenge.

Despite these early promising findings, there are fundamental limitations in resilience research that must be overcome to increase the relevance of the concept to military contexts. Much current research on resilience treats psychological resilience as a trait individuals possesses, albeit one that can be improved with training. This is especially true of the body of research underlying current Department of Defense resilience programs (Cornum et al., 2011). In contrast, other research has adopted the perspective that resilience is not an individual trait but is best seen as a quality that arises from the interaction of the individual with the environment. For example, Seccombe (2002, p. 385) writes, “The widely held view of resiliency as an individual disposition, family trait, or community phenomenon is insufficient … resiliency cannot be understood or improved in significant ways by merely focusing on these individual-level factors.” Similarly, Gilligan (2001, p. 94) argues, “The degree of resilience displayed by a person in a certain context may be said to be related to the extent to which that context has elements that nurture this resilience.” As an example of this divergence of perspectives, the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program emphasizes the importance of individual traits such as “grit”—the willingness to persist in the face of failure—as traits to inculcate on the basis of research showing it predicts successful completion of basic training (Duckworth et al., 2007). Yet persistence in the face of failure may cause problems when prior skills and practice are inappropriate to a new organization or culture and when adaptability may be more valued. Emphasizing the interaction of resilience traits with environments moves the study of resilience away from a study of individual differences and toward thinking about resilience as context dependent. The commit-

Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

tee believes understanding the contextual limits of resilience (and how to overcome them) is a promising direction for future research.

By restricting the focus to individual differences, resilience research has also underexplored the utility of the construct for groups and organizations. Most resilience research treats the individual as the unit of analysis and downplays the group or organizational levels of analysis. For example, of the 270 publications reviewed by the RAND report on resilience, only 13 examined organizational-level factors related to resilience (Meredith et al., 2011). There are at least two ways that group-level constructs can enrich the concept of resilience. The first, and most common, is to consider how group-level factors can improve the functioning of the individual. For example, social resilience can be defined as “the individual’s capacity to work with others” (Cacioppo et al., 2011). The other, and perhaps more relevant approach for military contexts, is to treat the organization as an entity that can be resilient in ways analogous to the individual. For example, some research uses the term psychological capital to describe the resilience of an organization, although it typically defines the resilience of the group as simply the sum of the resilience of its individual members (Luthans et al., 2007). More radical proposals suggest that the group should be seen as a unit of analysis that cannot be predicted solely in terms of properties of individuals. For example, organizational effectiveness may be best predicted by considering group-level factors as perceptions of individuals influenced by interpersonal factors such as social contagion (Clapp-Smith et al., 2009; see also Walumbwa et al., 2011). Other research has considered a society or community as a unit of analysis, although this work often appeals to ecological, rather than psychological, mechanisms to predict resilience to stress (Adger, 2000). In that soldiers are organized into and strongly identify with small units, and given the rich tapestry of formal and informal hierarchies found within military organizations, the committee believes expanding the construct of resilience to encompass such groups is a promising direction for future research.

The committee believes research on resilience is a promising direction for alleviating the stresses of environmental transitions; however, the current focus of recent research on individual antecedents and traits, why certain individuals are resilient to obstacles, and the consequences of resilience limits these potential benefits. Further research in this area could help to address the following questions:

  • What are the contextual limits of resilience and how can they be overcome? For example, how does resilience vary across environments and arise from the interaction of individual traits and situational factors?
Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
  • What are the group or organizational antecedents of resilience such as group bonds, leadership style, and organizational values?
  • What theories might explain how individual resilience relates to consequences at the organizational level? For example, is the effectiveness of an organization strictly increased by enhancing the resilience of its constituent members, or might factors that improve individual health undermine organizational effectiveness?
  • How do individual-level findings on resilience translate to the organizational level of analysis? For example, are there organizational analogues of the traits that explain why individuals are successful in the face of adversity?

Local and Global Consequences Clearly Interact

Finally, although the committee has discussed the local and global consequences of transitions as separate research questions (and they have largely been treated separately within behavioral science research), examining these questions together may yield further insights into how transitions impact soldier performance. For example, although environmental transitions tend to increase stress, the nature of this stress (and the specific resilience-building techniques required to buffer against it) may depend on which specific habits or routines are affected. Resilience and habit research bring two different levels of analysis to the same phenomena, and considering how these levels interact can lead to a better understanding of both global and local consequences of change. Research that combines these two perspectives could help to address the following questions:

  • Does the disruption of healthy habits following transitions help explain why transitions increase stress? For example, does an environmental transition lead to a general (albeit temporary) shift from automatic to more deliberative thinking, with a consequent increase in cognitive load and cognitive depletion, and thus explain increases in general stress? Alternatively, or perhaps in combination, does the disruption of beneficial habits (such as exercise, predictable sleep patterns, and healthy meals) undermine cognitive and physical functioning?
  • To the extent that good habits tend to be disrupted following an environmental transition, is there value in taking a resilience approach to analysis of this phenomenon? For example, rather than focusing on this as a pathology that should be treated, what positive traits or skills might explain why this does not occur in some individuals or organizational units? Are there social or organizational factors that encourage good behavior through transitions?
Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
  • Given that traits adaptive in one context sometimes persist into inappropriate contexts, are there positive traits or skills that explain why this does not occur in some individuals or between some contexts?
  • How do organizational routines support or detract from the resilience of organizations in the face of adversity?

FUTURE RESEARCH ON ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSITIONS

Conclusion 3

The committee concludes that the repeated environmental transitions faced by military personnel create significant challenges and opportunities to operational effectiveness and resilience.

Recommendation 3

The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and other U.S. military funding agencies should support basic research on:

  1. individual habits and organizational routines that are disrupted by environmental transitions, including research into the positive and negative consequences of these disruptions within specific military contexts and that examines how these consequences might be proactively managed to increase unit and soldier effectiveness;
  2. the interaction between individual characteristics and features of groups and organizations, with the aim of predicting resilience; how this interaction may differ across types of environments; and groups and organizations, as well as individuals, as the unit of analysis; and
  3. exploring in what ways and under what conditions local disruption of habits affects global consequences for resilience.

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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×

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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Environmental Transitions." National Research Council. 2014. The Context of Military Environments: An Agenda for Basic Research on Social and Organizational Factors Relevant to Small Units. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18825.
×
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The United States Army faces a variety of challenges to maintain a ready and capable force into the future. Missions are increasingly diverse, ranging from combat and counterinsurgency to negotiation, reconstruction, and stability operations, and 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 need to understand broader strategic goals and choose among courses of action. Like any workforce, the Army is diverse in terms of demographic characteristics such as gender and race, with increasing pressure 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.

Recognizing the need to develop a portfolio of research to better understand the influence of social and organizational factors on the behavior of individuals and small units, the U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI) requested the National Research Council's Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences to outline a productive and innovative collection of future basic science research projects to improve Amy mission performance for immediate implementation and lasting over the next 10-20 years. This report presents recommendations for a program of basic scientific research on the roles of social and organizational contextual factors, such as organizational institutions, culture, and norms, as determinants and moderators of the performance of individual soldiers and small units.

The Context of Military Environments: Basic Research Opportunities on Social and Organizational Factors synthesizes and assesses 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. This report focuses on tactical operations of small units and their leaders, to include the full spectrum of unique military environments including: major combat operations, stability/support operations, peacekeeping, and military observer missions, as well as headquarters support units. This report identifies key contextual factors that shape individual and small unit behavior and assesses the state of the science regarding these factors. The Context of Military Environments recommends an agenda for ARI's future research in order to maximize the effectiveness of U.S. Army personnel policies and practices of selection, recruitment, and assignment as well as career development in training and leadership. The report also specifies the basic research funding level needed to implement the recommended agenda for future ARI research.

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