Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities for Military Leader Influence

Abstract

Effective military leadership is contingent upon a host of performance capabilities. One capability central to success is effective influence across a variety of contexts and people. In the Army, leaders at all levels must be able to influence others across different types of missions. Leaders must be able to influence their own unit and chain of command, as well as personnel from other government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and joint, combined, and host nation elements. Because influence has a central role in leadership, it is critical to ensure that influence capabilities are an integral element of the leader assessment and development process. Thus, it is necessary to have a comprehensive picture of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) underlying effective influence behaviors. This report identifies leader influence strategies, describes 64 KSAOs relevant to leader influence, and provides recommendations for measuring and training KSAOs. The identified KSAOs serve as targets for building training and assessment interventions designed to enhance Army leaders ability to influence. Procedure: We reviewed existing academic and military literature regarding leader influence, KSAOs related to influence, and training strategies that could be applied to develop these KSAOs. Relevant literature included social capital, power, influence tactics, persuasion tactics, and impression management. Two models of leader influence-one pertaining to building influence capability and one pertaining to applying influence strategies-were developed from the literature. We organized KSAOs into proximal, medial, and distal predictors (i.e., immediate, midrange, and distant predictors) of influence behaviors. Proximal predictors included selfregulation and procedural knowledge and skills, medial predictors included declarative knowledge and influence motives, and distal predictors included cognitive attributes, noncognitive attributes (e.g., personality), and leadership/influence experience variables. We identified existing measures for the KSAOs and we rated measurement approaches for their utility in assessing each KSAO. Additionally, potential training methods were reviewed and considered visa -vis the KSAOs. Findings: The review indicates that complex relationships among power, influence tactics and influence outcomes exist. With respect to outcomes (i.e., compliance, commitment, and resistance), hard influence tactics (pressure, coalitions, legitimating) are more likely to result in compliance. Conversely, soft tactics-particularly rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, and consultation-result in higher commitment and are more effective at influencing others. vi Regardless of the tactic used, influence attempts are more likely to result in favorable outcomes when the leader has high referent power. Research also suggests that applying multiple influence tactics in combination is useful, but research has not yet delineated the best approaches for leaders to combine and sequence tactic...

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