Effective military leadership is contingent upon a host of performance capabilities. One capability central to success is effective influence across a variety of contexts and people. In the Army, leaders at all levels must be able to influence others across different types of missions. Leaders must be able to influence their own unit and chain of command, as well as personnel from other government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and joint, combined, and host nation elements. Because influence has a central role in leadership, it is critical to ensure that influence capabilities are an integral element of the leader assessment and development process. Thus, it is necessary to have a comprehensive picture of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) underlying effective influence behaviors. This report identifies leader influence strategies, describes 64 KSAOs relevant to leader influence, and provides recommendations for measuring and training KSAOs. The identified KSAOs serve as targets for building training and assessment interventions designed to enhance Army leaders ability to influence. Procedure: We reviewed existing academic and military literature regarding leader influence, KSAOs related to influence, and training strategies that could be applied to develop these KSAOs. Relevant literature included social capital, power, influence tactics, persuasion tactics, and impression management. Two models of leader influence-one pertaining to building influence capability and one pertaining to applying influence strategies-were developed from the literature. We organized KSAOs into proximal, medial, and distal predictors (i.e., immediate, midrange, and distant predictors) of influence behaviors. Proximal predictors included selfregulation and procedural knowledge and skills, medial predictors included declarative knowledge and influence motives, and distal predictors included cognitive attributes, noncognitive attributes (e.g., personality), and leadership/influence experience variables. We identified existing measures for the KSAOs and we rated measurement approaches for their utility in assessing each KSAO. Additionally, potential training methods were reviewed and considered visa -vis the KSAOs. Findings: The review indicates that complex relationships among power, influence tactics and influence outcomes exist. With respect to outcomes (i.e., compliance, commitment, and resistance), hard influence tactics (pressure, coalitions, legitimating) are more likely to result in compliance. Conversely, soft tactics-particularly rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, and consultation-result in higher commitment and are more effective at influencing others. vi Regardless of the tactic used, influence attempts are more likely to result in favorable outcomes when the leader has high referent power. Research also suggests that applying multiple influence tactics in combination is useful, but research has not yet delineated the best approaches for leaders to combine and sequence tactic...
Work formally celebrated its 100th anniversary at a dinner that drew nearly 400 people, including the President of Indiana University, Michael McRobbie, as well as state, city and civic leaders. President Barack Obama also sent a letter congratulating the School on its accomplishments.
Influencing individuals can be daunting when influence must occur across a cultural divide. This is precisely the situation in which security force advisors, combat advisor teams, and transition teams often find themselvesattempting to influence individuals from another culture who are not in their chain of command. This research product is an instructor's manual that contains scenarios and materials to help advisors learn more about the types of situations in which influence is necessary. The scenarios were drawn from real events told by returning advisors. This manual includes (1) a scenario-based self-assessment tool that prospective advisors can use to better understand their influence strategies, (2) student handouts to enable them to score their use of different influence tactics and the effectiveness of influence tactics, (3) a scoring and interpretation guide for nine types of influence tactics, such as rational persuasion and pressure, (4) a discussion guide that provides instructors with discussion questions for each scenario, and (5) a student handout describing the different types of influence tactics that appeared in the assessment tool. While scenarios are specific to advising host nation counterparts, this manual may be useful for military instructors interested in teaching about cross-cultural influence more generally.
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