Is naturalistic decision making a requirement for mission command? Intuitive decision making and its relation to mission command, in the United States Army, and the Norwegian Forsvaret.

The United States Army has had problems with the practical implementation of the leadership philosophy mission command [MC]. The Norwegian military on the other hand has achieved mostly MC in practice.. It is established that the concept of MC is an effective force multiplier. At the same time the decision making model of naturalistic decision making [NDM] has been acclaimed as an effective model for decision making, when dealing with little time, few resources and expert decision makers. This study aims to find out if there exists a correlation between NDM and MC, and to explore the possible differences this makes in Norway vs. in the U.S. Army and in micro vs. macro situations. To test the hypothesis, that NDM, and MC are linked, and that there exists differences between the two countries on the amount of correlated material. The thesis is structured in two parts. In the first a narrative literature review was conducted to develop a theoretical framework built on NDM and MC, based on comparison of different interpretations of these terms. The second part of the thesis revolves around testing the hypothesis. Starting with a systematic literature review,collecting data. Then, I coded the data in NVIVO to determine when facets of MC and NDM were attained, as well as when the terms regarded under the theme of “opposite of MC” were reached. In addition to when opinions about MC (positive or negative) were expressed. The data was then classified through four attributes (macro, micro, Norway and USA) to ensure the possibility of conducting sub-analysis on these terms. The second part of the thesis ends in a compiling of the dataframe in R, before running several regression analysis, and testing for correlations on multiple variables of the dataset. The results showed an acceptance of the hypothesis; the terms of NDM and MC were strongly correlated, with a clear difference between what terms were significant in the different attributes. These results suggest that organizations have to facilitate the use of NDM to employ, and institutionalize MC. Institutionalization could be strengthened in the U.S. Army by ensuring a more holistic organizational culture, following tenets of human relations management over classical management theory