Leadership Evaluation and Training through Behavioral Simulations: Method, Results, and Future Directions

Because of increasingly turbulent environment,1 responsiveness under time pressure, ability to handle emergencies under stress, and quick decision-making are becoming major components for leadership effectiveness [8]. Other acknowledged attributes, such as perseverance, communication skills, and positive interpersonal relations are positively related to leader effectiveness, but under conditions of environmental turbulence they assume critical importance [31. Unfortunately, a leader’s capability to perform effectively under stress is not usually identified until after he has been exposed to turbulent conditions in the field. As pointed out by Helme, Willemin, and Graf ton [3, p. 45], “prior exposure to a wide variety of demands in an unfamiliar setting provides reliable measures of behavior, which generalize beyond single specific situations, and therefore may be expected to generalize to other situations belonging to the same factorial domains. It follows that the practical application of the findings to leadership development of Army officers would be to arrange for such variety of demands in a novel setting to be incorporated into the ongoing training and experience program.