Main Subcommittee Category: Education

How would you label your submission?: Government

Abstract:

The U.S. Navy is developing a Navy Leadership Behavioral Model (NLBM) to improve assessment of leadership potential, develop effective leadership across Sailors, and select the right leaders for the right positions. Organizations traditionally rely on theory-driven leadership models with limited empirical validation. However, the Navy is collecting extensive data to empirically derive and validate a NLBM across Navy communities. This will set the foundation for a comprehensive talent management system to track and support personalized Sailor assessment, career-long leadership development, and command selection via an enterprise-wide software application connecting disparate data sources. This paper will describe the development of the NLBM and supporting empirical evidence.

A multi-stage, thematic analysis identified approximately 20 behavioral factors illustrating effective Navy leadership. First, a qualitative sorting of raw interview data from five Navy commands (n = 1,689) was used to group related statements; these were refined into an initial set of behavioral factors. Second, additional interview data was collected for validation and subsequent thematic coding (n = 2,131). Concurrently, two workshops with Navy subject matter experts were held to refine the behavioral factors and their operational definitions. Leveraging the refined model, all qualitative data was combined into a single dataset for a comprehensive sorting and quantitative analysis. This last step allowed us to assess the (1) metrics of inter-rater reliability, (2) factor commonalities via natural language processing analysis, and (3) Navy community priorities to support the current NLBM structure.

Because organizations rarely validate leadership behavioral models, sharing the empirical process for developing the NLBM will demonstrate how the combination of well-known and novel methods for analyzing qualitative data can provide stronger and more relevant solutions than relying on theory alone. Additionally, the paper will discuss how conducting the empirical analysis supports long-term validation against relevant criteria and advanced data analytics across disparate data sources.

Keywords: ASSESSMENT;BEHAVIOR MODELING;COMPETENCY BASED TRAINING;LEADERSHIP

Additional Keywords not in the list above: Talent Management

John Spinda

Affiliation

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