Military leaders and followers – do they have different decision styles?

Abstract

There are five different, although not mutually exclusive, styles exhibited by military officers when making decisions: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous (Scott & Bruce, 1995). The purpose was to investigate if elected leaders of military planning teams had a different configuration of decision-making styles than their team members. Participants were 98 army captains organized in 16 brigade-level planning teams. The results indicate that team leaders tended to be more spontaneous and less rational, dependent and avoidant in their style configuration than their team members. One possible explanation is that the style configuration exhibited by many of the elected leaders comes through to others as forcefulness and decisiveness and that such a profile is in line with a general leadership culture. The results also provide support for the General Decision-Making Style inventory as a measurement of decision styles, because they suggest that the self-reports coincide with displayed, observable behavior.

Leadership styles and decision-making styles in an Indonesian school context

“…We would expect that overall our findings are similar. In particular, we would expect to find that rational decision-making style has a positive relationship with dependent decision-making style and has negative relationships with the other three decision-making styles; that is, that our findings would be consistent with those of prior studies (Baiocco, Laghi, and D'Alessio 2008;Gambetti et al 2008;Scott and Bruce 1995b;Spicer and Sadler-Smith 2005;Thunholm 2004Thunholm , 2009.…”

Inter-rater reliability for movement pattern analysis (MPA): measuring patterning of behaviors versus discrete behavior counts as indicators of decision-making style

“…Such variation can be observed in various workplace contexts. For example, military leaders can differ greatly across dimensions of decision-making style such as rational, avoidant, spontaneous, and dependent (Thunholm, 2004, 2009). The unique leadership styles of world leaders are evident on the world stage and can be observed in real time and deciphered via analysis of videotape interaction and comparative analysis of different leaders who, for example, show differences in their inclination to implement action (Connors, 2006, unpublished).…”

Business Decision Making: Studying the Competence of Leaders

“…The current sample is comprised of business leaders from the private business and from different sectors, which adds diversity to other studies of styles and competence. Other studies focused on undergraduates (Bavolar, 2013;del Missier et al, 2012), a heterogeneous population sample (Bruine de Bruin et al, 2007), military leaders (Carnevale et al, 2011;Connors et al, 2013Connors et al, , 2014Connors et al, , 2015Thunholm, 2004Thunholm, , 2009, political leaders (Connors, 2006;Mintz, 2004;Renshon, 2015), terrorist leaders (Chatagnier et al, 2012), sales managers (Russ et al, 1996) and managers from the automotive industry (Erenda et al, 2014). Also, by not using college sophomores, we do not need to rely on a possible relationship between the performance of an unexperienced sample and leaders, thus avoiding possible differences already reported in the literature (Mintz et al, 2006;Renshon, 2015;Sears, 1986).…”

“…Self-report measures, such as the General Decision-Making Style (GDMS from Scott and Bruce, 1995), have been extensively used, for instance, to assess correlations between decisionmaking style of Swedish military officers and mental abilities necessary on battlefield situations (Thunholm, 2004) or to investigate differences in decision making style between army captains acting as leaders and followers (Thunholm, 2009).…”