A Study of Officer's Use of Leadership Skills Learned in the Navy's Intermediate Officer Leadership Course

Abstract

The U.S. Navy's present-day leadership training program, referred to as the Leadership Continuum, provides for leadership training for all enlisted personnel and officers at initial entry into the naval service and at designated career milestones until retirement. The Leadership Continuum evolved from a series of formal Navy leadership training programs dating back to the late 1970s. The Navy has expended a considerable amount of fiscal resources over the past 20 years in an attempt to provide quality leadership training to its personnel. However, past studies have revealed that leadership training course graduates are provided with little to no incentives by their supervisors to utilize the leadership skills learned after they returned to their jobs. This study analyzed survey responses from Intermediate Officer Leadership Course (IOLC) graduates to determine whether the problem observed in the past continued to be a problem in the contemporary Navy context. Specifically, the study attempted to determine what barriers and incentives graduates encountered that either hindered or encouraged their use of acquired IOLC leadership skills back on the job. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze and compare the distributed frequency of responses among the various sub-groups. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test for statistical significance between the sub-groups' responses. To reduce the possibility of revealing false-positive findings, all statistically significant ANOVA results were evaluated by both the Liberal Statistical Difference (LSD) and the Scheffe Post Hoc tests. The findings of the study revealed that the majority of respondents were able to utilize leadership skills acquired during IOLC on the job. Attempts to utilize Command Climate skills, however, were somewhat problematic when compared against the other three IOLC sub-units studied (Leadership Models, Situational Communications and Delegation). Female IOLC graduates took longer, on average, to apply acquired leadership skills on the job compared to the male graduates. The barriers most frequently identified by IOLC graduates that hindered their use of acquired leadership skills on the job was resistance to change from subordinates and peers. The incentives identified most frequently by IOLC graduates when attempting to apply acquired leadership skills on the job were (a) open lines of communications with subordinates and immediate superiors and (b) receptiveness from subordinates. A number of findings about relationships between skill use on the one hand and contextual or demographic variables on the other were judged to be statistically significant by both the LSD and the Scheffe Post Hoc tests.

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