Decision-making style and victory in battle—Is there a relation?

Abstract

Can decision-making styles impact victory and defeat in armed conflicts? To answer the question of whether decision-making styles are linked to the victories and defeats of individual tacticians, this study utilizes five general decision-making styles: Rational, Intuitive, Dependent, Avoidant and Spontaneous. The aim of this study is to examine whether one or several of the general decision-making styles (GDMS) have an impact on tactical outcomes in wargames. A total of 104 officers and academics participated in the study. The study’s foremost conclusion is that the Dependent style is significantly connected to defeat in the wargame’s dueling set up.

Notes

1 Susanne Scott and Reginald Bruce, “Decision-Making Style: The Development and assessment of a New Measure,” Educational and Psychological Measurement 55, no 5 (1995): 820.

2 Peter Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?” Personality and Individual Diffrencens 36 (2004): 941–2.

3 Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style,” 823.

4 Robert Loo, “A Psychometric Evaluation of the General Decision-Making Style Inventory,” Personality and Individual Differences 29 (2000): 895–905; Peter Thunholm, “Military Decision Making and Planning: Towards a New Prescriptive Model” (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology Stockholm University, 2003); Andrew Young, Chris Hennington, and Dane Eggleston, “US SWAT Operator Experience, Personality, Cognitive-Emotion Regulation and Decision-Making Style,” Policing: An International Journal 41, no. 2 (2018): 247–61.

5 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 933.

6 Adrián Alacreu-Crespo, Maria Fuentes, Diana Abad-Tortosa, Irene Cano-Lopez, Esperanza González, and Miguel Ángel Serrano, “Spanish Validation of General Decision-Making Style Scale: Sex Invariance, Sex Differences and Relationships with Personality and Coping Styles,” Judgment and Decision Making 14, no. 6 (2019): 745.

7 Martin Geisler and Carl Allwood, “Relating Decision-Making Styles to Social Orientation and Time Approach,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 31 (2018): 427.

8 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 933.

9 Alacreu-Crespo et al., “Spanish Validation of General Decision-Making Style Scale,” 739.

10 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 934.

11 Geisler and Allwood, “Relating Decision-Making Styles to Social Orientation and Time Approach,” 427.

12 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 934.

13 Alacreu-Crespo et al., “Spanish Validation of General Decision-Making Style Scale,” 745.

14 Peter Thunholm, “Decision-Making Styles and Physiological Correlates of Negative Stress: Is There a Relation?,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 49 (2008): 217.

15 Geisler and Allwood, “Relating Decision-Making Styles to Social Orientation and Time Approach,” 427.

16 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 934.

17 Young et al., “US SWAT Operator Experience, Personality, Cognitive-Emotion Regulation and Decision-Making Style,” 247–61.

18 With the exception one rational question, where there was no divergence, see Table 2, R4. Peter Thunholm, “Military Leaders and Followers—Do They Have Different Decision Styles?,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 50 (2009): 321–2.

19 Lars Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle: A Qualitative Study on Contemporary Tactics,” Defence Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 163–81; Peter Thunholm and Lars Henåker, “A Tentative Model on Effective Army Combat Tactics,” Comparative Strategy 39, no. 5 (2020): 490–504.

20 William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Colorado: Westview Press, Inc.; Fredrick A. Praeger, Publisher, 1985); Robert Leonhard, Fighting by Minutes (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994); Stephen Biddle, Military Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jim Storr, The Human Face of War (London: Continuum UK, 2009); Randall Collins, “A Dynamic Theory of Battle Victory and Defeat,” The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution (2010): 3–25.

21 Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle.”

22 Daniel Serfaty, Jean MacMillan, Elliot E. Entin, and Eileen B. Entin, “The Decision-Making Expertise of Battle Commanders,” in Naturalistic Decision Making, edited by C. E. Zsambok and G. Klein (Dayton, OH: Routledge, 1994), 233.

23 Ibid.

24 Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

25 John R. Boyd, “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” (2010), edited by C. Richards and C. Spinnery, the last known date January 1996, http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/, Atlanta, GA, 1996; John R. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” ed. C. Richards and C. Spinnery, the last known version Dec. 1986, modified 1991, http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/, 2007.

26 Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook, 4–8.

27 Berndt Brehmer, “Dynamic Decision Making in Command and Control,” in The Human in Command: Exploring the Modern Military Experience, edited by McCann and Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 234.

28 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 933–4.

29 Ibid.; Alacreu-Crespo et al., “Spanish Validation of General Decision-Making Style Scale,” 745.

30 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 933–4.

31 Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style.”

32 Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle.”

33 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Intuitive, Deliberative, and Calculative Models of Expert Performance,” in Naturalistic Decision Making, edited by C. E. Zsambok and G. Klein (Dayton, OH: Routledge, 1994), 17–28.

34 Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle.”

35 Caroline Zsambok and Gary Klein, Naturalistic Decision Making, edited by C. E. Zsambok and G. Klein (Dayton, OH: Routledge, 1994), 5.

36 Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming, edited by John Curry as part of the History of Wargaming Project, 2011, 158–64.

37 GDMS, Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style.”

38 Translated by Thunholm into Swedish, 2004.

39 Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style,” 827–8; Loo, “A Psychometric Evaluation of the General Decision-Making Style Inventory,” 899; Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?,” 938.

40 Dreyfus, “Intuitive, Deliberative, and Calculative Models of Expert Performance,” 17–25.

41 Lawrence Shattuck, Christopher Talcott, Michael Matthews, and Jennifer Clark, “Constructing Battlefield Understanding: A Comparison of Experienced and Novice Decision Makers in Different Contexts,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 46th Annual Meeting, 2002, 447.

42 Dreyfus, “Intuitive, Deliberative, and Calculative Models of Expert Performance,” 19.

43 Ibid, 20.

44 Ibid, 20–21.

45 Ibid, 21–22.

46 Ibid, 22–3.

47 Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle.”

48 Boone Bartholomees, “Theory of Victory,” in Parameters (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War Collage, 2008), 25–36.

49 Ibid, 27.

50 Advanced Progressive Matrices, Set II, 1998 edition.

51 John Creswell and David Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc, 2018), 12.

52 Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style.”

53 Barbara Tabachnick and Linda Fidell, Using Multivariate Statistics, 5th ed. (Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, Pearson Education Inc, 2007), 715.

54 Michael Browne and Robert Cudeck, “Alternative Ways of Assessing Model Fit,” in Testing Structural Equation Models, edited by K. A. Bollen and J. S. Long (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 144.

55 Arthur Aron, Elaine Aron, and Elliot Coups, eds., Statistics for Psychology, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2009), 630.

56 Collins, “A Dynamic Theory of Battle Victory and Defeat.”

57 Storr, The Human Face of War.

58 Refer to Peter Thunholm, “Military Leaders and Followers—Do They Have Different Decision Styles?,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 50 (2009): 321.

59 Scott and Bruce, “Decision-Making Style.”

60 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?”

61 Loo, “A Psychometric Evaluation of the General Decision-Making Style Inventory,” 904.

62 Thunholm, “Military Decision Making and Planning,” Studies 3, p. 17.

63 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Styles and Physiological Correlates of Negative Stress.”

64 Thunholm, “Military Leaders and Followers.”

65 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?”

66 Bartolomees, 2008.

67 Henåker, “Exploring Military Victory in Battle.”

68 Thunholm, “Decision-Making Style: Habit, Style or Both?.”

69 Ibid, 941–2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Henåker

Lars Henåker ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate at the Swedish Defence University, Stockholm. Mr Henåker writes articles in the subject of war studies that want to see publishing. His articles have appeared in a number of journals, including Defence Studies and Comparative Strategy. He contributes articles about victory and defeat in contemporary battlefield through exploring tacticians in their decision-making process. His articles focus on measuring victory and defeat through maneuver theories, exploring the participating subject’s tactical skills and their general decision making styles. His results reveal an “ideal model,” as a scientifically traceable "best practices" when it comes to ground tactics as a guide and what personal decision-making style risk to lose more frequently in battles.