Leadership: the key to meaning and resilience on deployment?

Service personnel can be exposed to a range of pressures and threats during deployment. However, although some military personnel suffer detrimental physical and mental health outcomes following such exposures, a substantial majority shows remarkable resilience by remaining psychologically robust, both during and after deployment. If protective and adaptive factors can be clearly identified and understood, it is possible that effective coping can be enhanced for even those most vulnerable to the strain of deployment. In the present study, factors that potentially buffer the effects of deployment stressors were examined in an ARA unit (N = 428) deployed to East Timor during OP WARDEN. The factors studied were cohesion, leadership, morale, and meaning. Structural equation modelling indicated that leadership was a key variable in both buffering the immediate impact of stressors and also fostering the cohesion and morale. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of what leaders can do to promote resilience through their behaviours