Authority and influence in military noncommissioned officer leadership

Noncommissioned Officer

Importance of Being a Noncommissioned Officer

The basic assumption underlying these hypotheses is that attempts to influence others are instrumental acts whose occurrence is determined by the perceived probability of success in achieving some goal. Therefore influence attempts will occur if the inducer perceives a readiness of the recipient to accept his influence and if he believes that the induced behavior will, in fact, lead him to his goal. Three hypotheses were derived from these assumptions.

What is ordinarily called authority in a military organization combines two factors which should be distinguished. (a) The authority of an officer over his men includes coercive power, i.e., the ability to punish his subordinates for noncompliance with his orders. (b) It also includes a predisposition on the part of the subordinate willingly to accept the influence of the officer because he perceives it as legitimate (Schachter et al., 2008). Presumably coercive power will lead to overt conformity without covert change of attitude on the part of the subordinate. The acceptance of authority as legitimate, on the other hand, should produce covert changes in attitudes and behavior as well as overt conformity. Hypothesis II-2, since it deals only with the acceptance of authority as legitimate, predicts changes in the private opinions and covert behavior of the men (Festinger, 1999).

Hypothesis II-3: The effectiveness of an influence attempt by the leader (or member) increases with increasing perception that he is an expert in the area of the influence attempt.

This common sense hypothesis also has a long research history, whether as the effect of "expert opinion" (Back, 2001) or "source credibility" (Snyder, 2007). Eventually this hypothesis should be refined with respect to the areas of expertness, the interrelations among them, and the relation of this dimension to other dimensions of interpersonal perception. However, our data do not permit such refined analyses.

Hypothesis II-4: The total amount of influence effected by a leader (or member) over a member increases with increases in the amount of influence attempted.

At the low extreme, it seems obvious that one can expect no influence if there is no communication and no attempt at influence. However, the relation between these two variables is not obviously a linear one: it might well be that attempts to influence beyond a certain level, especially if these attempts are not seen as legitimate, might well result in reduced effectiveness. However, within the more usual range of behavior exhibited by a leader, we would expect a monotonically increasing relationship (Snyder, 2007).

The preliminary field study. Before describing the methods used in these two experiments, it will be worth reporting some of the relevant findings from a preliminary field study (2). This study was conducted on the line maintenance personnel of two aircraft maintenance squadrons located at a training base (Festinger et al., 1950). The relevant data were collected largely through the use of written questionnaires dealing with a number of attitudes toward matters of concern to the men and of importance to the performance of their daily work. The same questionnaire was used to measure the attitudes of the noncommissioned officers who supervised the men. For each attitude, the noncommissioned officer was asked how strongly he attempted to influence his men to believe as he did. Measures of the acceptance of supervisors were supplied largely by ranked sociometric choices made from lists of the personnel in the entire squadron. Our major measures of the influence of the noncommissioned officer over his airmen consisted of measures showing how closely the airman's attitude was related to the attitude of his noncommissioned officer and to the official beliefs and attitudes which the noncommissioned officer is supposed to support (Festinger, 1999).

In analyzing the amount of influence attempted by noncommissioned officers, we found: (a) the closer the noncommissioned officers own attitude to the officially approved attitudes of the Air Force, the stronger his influence attempts; (b) the noncommissioned officer attempts much stronger influence on attitudes relevant to the work of the group than on attitudes and opinions unrelated to the work; (c) but there is no relation between the acceptance of the leader and the strength of influence he attempts. The surprising lack of clear positive findings on (c) suggested the need for more carefully controlled research, employing less subjective measures of influence attempted (Back, 2001).

The effectiveness of the leader tended to be related to his acceptance both as a spare-time companion and as a crew chief. Finally there was some support for the hypothesis that the stronger the influence attempted by the leader, the greater the amount of change he produced in the attitudes of his subordinates. Both of these determinants of effectiveness seemed to require further checking with better measures of effectiveness. The present experiments check these findings (Biddle et al., 2004).

Design of the Experiments

The main reason for employing the experimental method in this phase of research was to test more unequivocally our major hypotheses about the influence of the leader as related to interpersonal relations, and in particular, to determine the direction of causation in these relationships. The experimental design involved two parts sufficiently independent to be considered as two separate experiments. The first -- the group judgment test -- was designed to study the influence of the leader on the opinions and judgments of his followers, while the second -- a card-sorting task (Festinger et al., 1950) was intended to measure his influence on productivity. The first experiment tested the influence of the leader in a free discussion situation where he was permitted to attempt as much influence as he liked using any method he could devise. In the second, both the methods of influence employed and the amount of influence attempted were held constant in order to discover whether there was a direct relationship between the effectiveness of attempted influence and the interpersonal relations between leader and follower.

Both experiments employed much more carefully controlled measurement of the effectiveness of influence than was possible in the field study. Instead of inferring the existence of an influence process from the relationship of the airman's opinion to the opinion of his noncommissioned officer, we brought the influence process into the laboratory and measured the actual changes induced by the leader. In the group judgment test this was accomplished by having the airmen record private judgments before discussion with the noncommissioned officer and after the discussion. In the card-sorting experiment the influence of inductions from the leader was measured by the actual change in the quantity and quality of work performed by the group of airmen. The major independent variables of interpersonal relationship between leader and followers were not manipulated directly because we could find no method for producing sufficiently large changes in these already established relationships (Snyder, 2007). Instead we selected as subjects all noncommissioned officers of a given classification and hoped that the actual interpersonal relationships with the airmen would show enough variation to permit testing of our hypotheses (Schachter et al., 2008). The procedure may be summarized briefly:

1. From existing small work groups in the Air Force we selected the supervisor and three members chosen as far as practicable at random. When they arrived at the experimental room, they were told that their cooperation was needed in several research projects, that they were not being tested in any way, and that they would not be identified.

2. Each subject answered privately a written questionnaire measuring the major independent variables of interpersonal relationships (Snyder, 2007).

3. Next, each group participated in the group judgment test. In this experiment each of the members in the group made a number of individual judgments from a set of stimulus figures. Unknown to the subjects these figures were not all the same. Slightly different forms of each figure were distributed in a way designed to produce planned patterns of disagreement within the group. After the members had completed their preliminary judgment, they held a discussion under instructions to try to reach agreement. After the discussion the group members again recorded their private judgments. Observational data provided the measures of attempted influence, and the changes from the preliminary to the final judgment provided a measure of the effectiveness of influence attempted.

4. Finally, the subjects were presented with the card-sorting task as an investigation of different ways of organizing a group. Three airmen were assigned a task of hand-sorting punched cards according to the number of holes in each card (Festinger et al., 1950). A scoring system, depending upon the total number of cards sorted, the number correctly sorted, and the number of errors, was described and was stated to be the basis for comparing groups of different organization. The noncommissioned officer in charge of the group was assigned the task of checking the work of his three airmen, of comparing their results with those of other groups, and giving the group members instructions which would enable them to improve their performance. He was located in an adjoining room and was required to send all communications to his group by written notes. Actually he was asked to copy four standard notes, the first two instructing the group to slow down in order to make fewer errors, the last two instructing them to speed up. This aspect of the design was similar to the experiment of Schachter, Ellertson, McBride, and Gregory (Biddle et al., 2004).

Subjects. Each group consisted of the supervisor and three of his subordinates taken from groups of instructors in the technical training schools at Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois. In our study, we used only noncommissioned officer supervisors and enlisted men serving under them.

We did not request subjects by name, because we hoped to give them as good an assurance of anonymity as possible, in order to increase the validity of their ratings of each other on the "Group Questionnaire," which provided our data on interpersonal relations. In arranging for subjects, we asked the organizations concerned to select men alphabetically by last name to accompany the supervisors. Probably this procedure was followed in most cases, but we know there were some deviations (Cartwright & Zander, 2003). To the extent that there was any systematic selection of subjects it may have had the effect of reducing the range in our interpersonal variables; but it is hard to see how it could have introduced any bias into the results obtained. Thirty-six experimental groups were studied during the spring of 1952. From all of these we obtained usable data for the group judgment test. However, in the card-sorting experiment, mainly because of scheduling difficulties, only 26 groups yielded data which could be used in the final analysis.

Findings and Conclusion

Two experiments were conducted to test seven hypotheses about the exertion of influence on judgments and behavior in small groups. In the preliminary field study, the amount of attempted influence reported by the noncommissioned officer was strongly related to organizational factors (the extent to which his own attitudes were officially approved and the relevance of the attitudes to the job), but was not related to interpersonal acceptance. In the first experiment these organizational factors were minimized by using judgments or opinions unrelated to the jobs of the subjects; hence interpersonal factors should account for more of the variance (Schachter et al. 2008).

Hypothesis I-1: The amount of influence attempted by a leader (or member) over a given recipient increases with increasing acceptance of him by the recipient (Schachter et al., 2008). Taken together, the several analyses of this relation for leaders and for members both within and among groups give strong confirmation of the hypothesis. Apparently it is a more important determinant for members than for formal leaders.

Hypothesis I-2: The amount of influence attempted by a leader (or member) increases with increasing certainty in his own opinion. Taken together, the three analyses (for the leaders only) significantly confirm the hypothesis (Festinger et al., 1950).

Hypothesis I-3: The amount of influence attempted by a leader (or member) increases with decreasing certainty of opposing opinion in the recipient. Three separate analyses are consistent in showing no significant confirmation of the hypothesis. Perhaps there was a contrary process operating simultaneously: when the opponent was less certain he changed more quickly and hence the leader could attempt less influence and still reach his goal. Both of these opposing processes are consistent with the basic assumption that the occurrence of an influence attempt is determined by the perceived probability of success in achieving some goal.