Traditionally, the military is seen as an unequivocally authoritarian organization. With survey data collected at the Royal Danish Military Academy, this study shows that that is a qualified truth. Thus, cadets enrolled directly from the noncommissioned officer corps—those most acquainted with the norms of the armed forces—do not weigh authoritarian leadership values over nonauthoritarian ones. Instead, their view reflects that for the experienced leader, the context, and not overt ideals, enables them to choose the leadership tools they expect will prove most effective. On the contrary, cadets enrolled based on their civilian merits clearly prioritize authoritarian values. This is particularly true among cadets returning to the military after a break, former professionals, and former draftees alike. Their view also reflects experience, but a different kind of experience, as they have primarily encountered the military hierarchy from the receiving end.

To what degree do future military officers resemble the traditional hierarchical leadership ideal, and to what degree do they resemble an emerging new kind of network-based leadership ideal? Military organizations are constantly changing in response to pressures from within the organization and surrounding society. Today, such changes exert themselves in novel recruitment strategies for a new generation of military leaders. Previous studies have shown how a new network-organizational paradigm has come to the fore in military leadership and officer recruitment. However, the core requirements of military leadership-remaining calm under pressure and demonstrating an ability to lead others and inspire followership-remain the same. Military psychological scholarship has often focused on subgroups within the military rather than general differences in personality between military and civilian populations. We remedy this limitation in the literature, and use the Big Five taxonomy and a unique dataset consisting of the personality profiles of an entire cohort of Danish officer cadets (n = 190) and a large (n = 1,568) Danish population-representative sample. We compare officer cadets to civilians using a three-level matching procedure, finding that the pool from which future military leaders are selected, the military cadets, are less neurotic, more extraverted and somewhat more conscientious than their civilian counterparts, traits that we theorize fit with the core requirements of traditional military leadership. The results indicate that cadets are no less open or agreeable than the general population, traits that we theorize are related to a balancing towards the network-organizational paradigm.

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