Attrition in the army: why do so many leave during training?

Here's another report from the 2012 DOP conference.

The British army loses nearly one third of its recruits to attrition, many leaving during the first 14 weeks of training. Its size means reducing this figure by a percentage point could save almost £750,000. MOD psychologist Natalie Fisher investigated the nature of this early attrition, taking a multi-layered approach, speaking to recruits at various stages around the training period.

In a series of five focus groups, Fisher drilled deeply into the experiences of successful trainees. She found that the majority had considered leaving at one point or other, due to missing their families or dissatisfactions, such as over basic wage levels. The reasons for pushing on were diverse, but commonly included the desire to serve overseas and a sense of letting the family down.

The focus groups identified a critical period around week seven of training, which proved particularly challenging for leavers: this was the time when they were least likely to feel like a soldier or a sense of belonging. It's probably no coincidence that this period coincides with the weekend home and the chance to catch up with the world left behind...

Interviewing recruits who left during training, Fisher found negative reasons for joining up, such as ‘no career options’, were more frequent than for those who stayed through training. The latter group more often cited being driven by expectations and having family support. The interviews with leavers also identified they were much more likely to feel homesickness from the first week in training onward. Fisher pointed out that the psychological literature on this is problematic, as it focuses on students and children away at camp, and may not be generalisable. Certainly, some of the recommendations from that research, such as ‘get enough sleep’, aren’t entirely compatible with the training experience. However, the advice to establish solid routines and ensure access to someone to speak with are pertinent.

The study raises many questions: for instance, of those who were recruited but never even made it to training, some had concrete reasons, such as illness or family need, but one third simply changed their mind at the last minute. Why? And Fisher spoke to training instructors, who identified some perceived characteristics of those who left, such as a dislike of discipline, but conceded many exits were simply unpredictable. Were they not getting something they were looking for in the role?  Like most organisations, the British army want to warn off applicants who would be a poor fit, but also prevent avoidable attrition of people who could have ultimately been a success in the role. In such high-stakes positions, this is a true balancing act.

Leadership positions for women are often atop a glass cliff

Back in 2003, Michelle Ryan checked her pigeonhole and found an article from the business section of The Times in 2003, stating that the ‘triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has wreaked havoc’ on companies' performance. This was to be the spark for a line of enquiry that has borne years of fruitful research, and the story began her DOP keynote tour of the 'glass cliff'. The term riffs on the metaphor of the glass ceiling – the invisible limit which prevents women from making it to the top of organisations. The glass cliff is an invisible risk, referring to the experience of women who make it to senior positions, only to discover they are unusually precarious.

Ryan began to perceive the glass cliff by scrutinising the claims of that newspaper article, deposited by an unknown friendly colleague. Historical data comparing 19 women appointed to the Board of Directors with a matched sample showed that appointments of women were indeed associated with slumps in share price, but that the slump preceded the appointment. The article had based its claims on a false assumption of causality, and it seemed instead that women were more likely to be appointed to companies in crisis.

Ryan then used experimental investigations involving hypothetical situations. She asked participants to decide how they would fill a position, such as company finance director, by choosing between two similar candidates who differed in gender. When the position was presented within a stable context – a growing company, a winnable political seat – then the candidates were similarly favoured. However, when the situation was presented as one with a high chance of failure – a company in crisis, or an unwinnable seat – the woman was a far more popular selection. People were even more likely to choose a female youth representative for a festival that was experiencing declining popularity.

Perhaps women are seen as better crisis managers than men? (Ryan quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘women are like teabags. You don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.’) In another study, participants judged that a company in a stable context need a leader who was assertive, competitive, or possessed other traits judged to be stereotypically masculine by other participants in a pre-study phase. Meanwhile, leaders in crisis situations should be understanding, tactful, creative – more stereotypically feminine.

But what is it about crises that women are seen as suited for: taking control and improving performance, for instance? Not so; a follow-up that separated out different aspects of leading in crisis found female traits were only favoured for the purpose of soaking up criticism or enduring negative conditions. And another study showed that when the crisis situation had full support of senior leadership, there was no preference for women to take the role. The data suggests that women are preferred when the situation is not just risky but actively precarious, with likely negative repercussions for the situation and themselves.

What are the consequences for female board members? Well, there is evidence that female CEOs have far shorter tenures, and these may reflect the fact that their positions are often set up to fail. Ryan concluded that in the pursuit of equal opportunity, we shouldn't be misled by the raw numbers of women in leadership positions; the nature of the role matters just as much.

In an interesting extension of her experimental work, Ryan and colleagues collected folk theories for the glass cliff via the BBC website. Women tended to believe that women are singled out for precarious positions, or that they have fewer opportunities and therefore accept riskier positions. The majority of men simply didn’t believe that women are differentially placed on the glass cliff.

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Sample article:

Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R (2011). Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of applied psychology, 96 (3), 470-84 PMID: 21171729

Proceedings from the DOP annual conference

Last month saw the BPS's Division of Occupational Psychology hold their annual conference, this year on the theme of delivering excellence. Over our next posts, the Occupational Digest will give a round-up of what we learned at the conference, reporting on established phenomena as well as breaking research. Note as always that conference proceedings are yet to be peer reviewed.

Resolutions 2012 roundup

Posting this January at the Occupational Digest has had a twofold aim: to provide a retrospective on our first year in the blog, and to gather insights from these into a set of actionable 'resolutions' to take into your workplace this year.

For ease of access, here's a quick directory to these posts. Alternatively, simply click the resolutions label at the bottom of this post or in the tag cloud in the left sidebar to see them all.

1. Take the harder edges off work
2. Make better selection decisions
3. Get a handle on emotion and mood in the workplace
4. People differ (so now what?)
5. Attract and keep the right people for your workplace
6. Manage perceptions, focus attention
7. Working together

Resolutions 2012: Working together

In our final set of resolutions for 2012, we look at the foundation of any organisation, the need to work together.  The workplace has always lived or died by the ability of its members to  communicate, collaborate, and navigate tensions. Even oft-maligned areas like middle management make contributions by helping different parts of the organisation make sense of others, translating grand concepts to the practicalities of the shop floor and vice versa.


Get smarter about being creative together.

1. Encourage helping on creative tasks, but avoid that responsibility falling to the same people. Evidence suggests that soliciting and obtaining help can lead individuals to more creative outcomes. The catch is that help-givers show reduced creativity, perhaps because helping behaviours eat into their own time for exploring possibilities, or they become increasingly sure of their own perspective, narrowing their horizons.

2. Bring ideas up-front to a collective brainstorm. This isn't a new idea: there is substantial evidence that ideas can get lost in the mix of a freewheeling conversation driven by social factors. Recent research suggests another issue: early suggestions in the brainstorm can activate related concepts, leading to a domination of one class of suggestion at the expense of others. Ensuring you have surveyed your own mental landscape before exploring those of others' makes it more likely you can cover all the bases.

Responsibility and collaboration

3. Avoid diluting responsibility when setting goals. Research suggests we put in less effort to plan and monitor progress towards goals when we contemplate how others will step in if we fail. In this sense, strong support networks can have counterproductive effects: they let us off the hook. It's a good idea to make it clear that sources of support shouldn't be burdened with keeping things rolling, but are there to provide help with problems or when things are truly stuck.

4. Address lack of trust and bad feelings in teams to prevent things turning toxic. Evidence suggests that a key precursor to teams fracturing into subgroups is a low level of liking or trust. A group in this situation could continue to function as long as members nonetheless understood each other's perspectives; however, the factionalism would still persist, as this comes down to how people feel, rather than think, about each other.

5. Prevent teams going rotten by pairing members with non-team buddies. The dark side of trust: too much within a morally flexible team gives them the freedom to embark on dodgy behaviour. If trust isn't absolute - the team isn't fully "psychologically safe" - then such suggestions are more likely to be suppressed. One way to produce this might be to ensure team members have regular individuals outside the team that they are encouraged to speak to and confide in; peer mentoring or buddy systems would mean that unscrupulous ideas are never safe from some sort of exposure.

Ethics and power

6. Role model better moral perspectives to followers. When your team chuckles over that customer who couldn't get the hire car out of the garage you could join in, or stand apart and draw attention to the responsibility they should be feeling. Standing apart can be risky; being typical of the group helps leaders retain sympathy, especially after failures (external link, abstract only). But it's only by doing so that you are able apply influence to shift people to a new perspective. And the evidence shows that leaders who take this different perspective are accepted as more ethical by their teams.

7. Call out abuses of power to prevent bad seeds rising. It seems that casually breaking rules makes you appear more powerful to others, probably because the converse is true - powerful people can afford to break rules. As positions of power are apt to be given to those who appear ready for them, this attitude can help the wrong people to the top. If organisations encourage employees to challenge personal rudeness, skipping lunch queues, and the like, we can put the bad behaviour back in its box.

Leader support

If you're towards the top of your organisation, there's good you can do within and beyond it.

8. Commit to longer mentoring relationships to give the most to mentees. It can take time for mentoring relationships to yield value to those involved, especially when there are impediments to the relationship quickly forming, such as coming from different backgrounds or being a different gender. A few months isn't enough to get over that hump, so put yourself in the picture for longer.

9. Offer support to other leaders. According to one study, a CEO receives twice as much work-related support from having access to a CEO network as they do from their friends and families. Offering this support, through one to one conversations or informal groups, enables other leaders to engage in more critical leadership behaviours, such as mentoring their own subordinates; the help gets paid forward, so to speak.

2012 Resolutions: manage perceptions, focus attention

We know that subtle cues can influence how we behave in the world and in the workplace. For example, women give different ratings of work gender discrimination depending on whether they saw a phrase on a poster moments before. And perception can have a more overt influence, such as the way that external scrutiny encourages boards to dump compromised directors. What we notice and who notices us matters: it's the attention, stupid.

So here are some ways to orient attention and create more helpful perceptions within your organisations.

1. Dig into the impact of your incentive programs. Individual incentives encourage productivity, whereas group incentives tend to lead to better quality. But trying to simply layer individual targets over group ones can end up smothering them, especially in work teams with very fixed capacities. And theorists warn that employee of the month programs might have perverse effects. Why not find out the situation at your organisation? Try speaking to staff, and if you have the resources, do some research.

2. Scrub stereotype threats from your customer-facing environments. Certain services and products can produce associations with maths (eg finance) or engineering (car garages) or other areas that women are stereotypically depicted as weaker. Cues that draw attention to gender or the technical nature of the area can turn women away, sensitive that a male who sells to them may attempt to exploit them.

3. Ensure your invitations for employees to voice opinion are authentic and not seen as lip service. When people believe that their suggestions or survey responses are not going to be listened to, they can see it as deceitful, lose their faith in the organisation's legitimacy, and can end up mired in conflict within teams (link). So if you're going to ask for opinions, make sure you will be able to read them, and at least in principle have the power to act on them.

4. Get more conservative estimates by framing your requests correctly. People seem to see a chunk of work differently depending on how long they think it will take, versus how much of it they can get done in a fixed amount of time. Bias can creep in both ways, so make sure you know what you are asking for.

And finally... improving your own circumstances

5. Get good at self-promoting - but hold back in high-modesty cultures. Particularly in job application contexts, candidates who can advocate for what they bring to an organisation are more likely to be successful. However, there is a sting in the tail: in some cultures, this kind of behaviour is frowned upon and can hurt your chances. Meanwhile, highball your salary requests to reach higher settlements (6). Thanks to the anchoring effect, introducing large numbers into conversations can frame the negotiations at a higher level, leading to better outcomes. These numbers can even be ridiculous, as long as they are delivered with a sense of humour.

2012 Resolution: attract and keep the right people for your workplace

Getting people in

It's all very well having the best methods of selection, but you need to get motivated, capable and well-fitted people interested in working with you.




1. Cultivate a good word-of-mouth reputation to attract highly educated graduates. So treat existing employees well and avoid allegations of hypocrisy by ensuring your internal culture fits with your external brand.  The received wisdom of 'campus presence' turns out to be on rather flimsier ground  (it may even be counterproductive for world-wise candidates), but the evidence is that people trust word-of-mouth.

2. Ensure online recruitment materials reveal the diversity within the office. There's evidence that both black and white applicants are more likely to peruse sites that present images of diversity, treating it as a marker of merit. Of course, this doesn't mean misleading applicants as to the true nature of your workplace!

3. Treat your intake of young  workers as you do graduates: as an investment in the future. Many industries rely heavily on young workers, and experts argue we should take this work more seriously, offering better working conditions, access to training and recognising good performance. That way, those who thrive will recommend their workplace to their social circles, reducing churn costs, and may themselves stay with the company into adulthood, or return after studies.

Keeping people sweet

We're living in an era of unprecedented attention to the notion of wellbeing, satisfaction and happiness. Even if we believe that material conditions are primary – for instance, that money buys you happiness – there are undoubtedly other measure we can take to better conditions in the workplace, and here the psychological literature can really help.

4. Explore whether your older employees are hankering after managerial responsibilities. Employees older than 45 have a stronger preference to supervise others than their younger colleagues. Of course, "want to" does not equate to "should", but such preferences are likely to drive engagement, so it's unwise to ignore them, especially in a workforce, which, at least in the first world, is ageing at an unprecedented rate.

5. Take up volunteering. An unexpected resolution? People who volunteer time out of work gain benefits they carry into the following working day. Actually, it shouldn't surprise: volunteering epitomises many of the evidence-based five ways to wellbeing, including giving, connecting to others, and (often) a degree of physical activity.

6. Experiment with focused breaks to enhance health and energy at work. Maintaining our health at work allows us to function better and avoid illness, stress and burnout. So you may want to explore the idea of packaging activities such as mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises or physical activity into bite-size packages during the working day.

However....

There is a potential dark side to a focus on enjoyment on the workplace. As outlined in this article, emphasis on "fun" can end up being inauthentic, pressurise everyone into the same mould, and draw young workers into unhealthy dependency on their employer as the source of their social support as well as income. So stand up to cynical uses of fun and socialising in the workplace (7).