Collective leadership in the military: Necessity or not in raising unit effectiveness?

Abstract

Although military organizations are seen as hierarchical organizations with a strict top-down chain of command, most of the activities are performed collectively where all personnel are expected to exercise leadership to succeed in completing the mission. This indicates that collective leadership is an outcome of the collective processes and acts as a mediator between the leadership behaviour of commanders and unit effectiveness. Therefore, the purpose of this study is two-fold. First, to determine to what extent collective leadership is expressed in the military environment, and second, to identify the relationship between the leadership competencies of commanders and the collective leadership of their units in terms of unit effectiveness. To achieve this purpose, empirical quantitative research was designed to explore three major components: leadership behaviour in commanders, collective leadership, and unit effectiveness. The leadership behaviour of commanders is seen as a set of interpersonal and intrapersonal leadership competencies divided into three dimensions: relational, change, and task. Authentic leadership represents the relational, transformational change and transactional task dimensions. Collective leadership was described through organizational leadership capabilities including organizational alignment and cohesion, informal communication, extent of centralisation and a control-feedback system. Unit effectiveness was defined through satisfaction with leader behaviour, and perceived individual and unit performance. The data was collected from the major military training facilities of the Estonian Defence Forces. The sample consists of conscripts (N= 1579) with a mean age of 20.3 (SD 1.5) years, mostly male (98.8%) with secondary education (86.9%) who were divided into 45 platoons. Each respondent assessed the leadership behaviour of their platoon leader and their unit effectiveness by completing questionnaires. Preliminary results indicate that satisfaction with leader is highly positively related to most of the leadership competencies in each dimension, except punitive behaviour and performance. Organizational alignment and cohesion from collective leadership are highly affected by the change dimension of intrapersonal competencies while the extent of centralisation has the strongest connection to rewarding behaviour. The control and feedback system from collective leadership strongly related to both change and task dimensions.