Identifying and assessing tacit knowledge: understanding the practical intelligence of military leaders

Scoring method of a Situational Judgment Test: influence on internal consistency reliability, adverse impact and correlation with personality?

“…A study on an SJT used for the US Airforce found that the mean ratings of the SMEs strongly correlated with the mean ratings of the group of respondents (Legree 1995;Legree and Grafton 1995). Similar results were found for an SJT measuring Tacit Knowledge of Military Leadership comparing lieutenants (i.e., SMEs) with cadets (Hedlund et al 2003). Comparison of two SJT scoring keys based on either novices' or experts' mean effectiveness ratings found a correlation of .75 between the two keys (Motowidlo and Beier 2010).…”

Leader Experience and the Identification of Challenges in a Stability and Support Operation

“…Researchers noted that leaders draw from experience to deal with interpersonal and organizational issues (Cianciolo, Antonakis, & Sternberg, 2004;Hedlund, Forsythe, Horvath, Williams, Snook, & Sternberg, 2003) or to make decisions in the context of battle command (Carnahan, et al, 2004;Serfaty, MacMillan, E. E. Entin, & E. B. Entin, 1997). Like "experts" traditionally depicted in the cognitive psychology literature, effective leaders possess complex, well-organized and domain-specific schematic structures of knowledge that allow them to respond flexibly to a large range of situational demands (Streufert & Nogami, 1992;Zaccaro, Gilbert, Thor, & Mumford, 1991).…”

“…The present investigation explores how commissioned military officers differ from pre-commissioned military cadets in their understanding of a complex operational environment. Unlike earlier research that focused primarily either on tactical or interpersonal aspects of military leadership (Hedlund et al, 2003;Serfaty et al, 1997), the present investigation explores the full range of leadership considerations, including interpersonal, cultural, and tactical actions. This investigation also examines how the perception of uncertainty is related to different assessments of the situation and how those assessments may differ depending on the individual's level of experience.…”

Applying Consensus-Based Measurement to the Assessment of Emerging Domains

“…The third database corresponds to the Tacit Knowledge for Military Leadership (TKML) scale (Hedlund et al, 2003;Psotka et al, 2004). The TKML was designed to measure the practical, action-oriented knowledge that Army leaders typically acquire from experience.…”

“…While most applications have utilized expert groups to develop scoring standards (see Hedlund et al, 2003), other attempts have constructed scoring keys based on data collected from large groups of respondents who were knowledgeable concerning the subject domain but could not be qualified as experts. The scoring keys from these groups of non-experts were believed to have closely approximated the scoring standards that would have been obtained from experts.…”