Enabling Army’s Team Learning

‘Team learning’ refers to a set of shared understandings, practices and processes that occur within a team as a collective and, fundamentally, can provide solutions to difficult operational problems. For example, when LTCOL (retired) Bruce Cameron was asked what his most important leadership lesson was, he answered:

[N]ot to be predictable. Four tank squadrons were deployed to Vietnam between 1968 and 1971. Each of them trained using exactly the same tactical drills (contact, defile and mine). By the time our squadron deployed in 1971, the enemy knew these drills as well as, if not better than, we did … Leaders must continually ask themselves: am I being predictable?[1]

Developing and implementing unpredictable and novel solutions to tactical, operational and strategic problems relies on teams’ and their leaders’ learning and sharing solutions. Therefore, team learning can help enhance operational effectiveness, improve readiness, encourage innovation, build a more resilient and adaptive workforce and, finally, foster a culture of collaboration and teamwork.[2] Understanding how to better enable Army team learning fits squarely within a priority research theme in the Australian Army Futures Research Framework (AFRF)[3] as part of the ‘developing teams, individuals and leaders’ theme. The 2023 AFRF research priorities were drawn from across the Army, including the 2020 Defence Strategic Update,[4] which identified that ‘the drivers of change … have accelerated faster than anticipated’ with Australia now facing ‘increasing[ly] strategic competition’ within our local region. The AFRF is designed to focus research attention on addressing blockers of Army delivering capability. 

One of the well-known blockers to team performance and learning is hierarchy—namely, authority and power differences in teams.[5] As a ‘deeply hierarchical’ organisation,[6] the Australian Army also needs to learn, adapt and innovate quickly. Yet how Army might do so is not clear and this knowledge gap leads to diverse and fragmented views on team learning. For example, there is continuing debate about team or collective learning components within the Army training continuum.[7] This paper provides evidence-based recommendations for enabling team learning based on empirical statistical modelling, integrating both individual and team-level factors. In doing so, the nuanced relationships between rank and power differences, deployment, shared sense of psychological equity, and leadership are evaluated to better understand when, where and how Army teams learn. Anchored in the argument of former Director-General, Future Land Warfare, Brigadier Langford that the Australian Army ‘should always seek to learn … being curious and inquisitive’,[8] the paper focuses on understanding the interplay of factors which enable team learning within the Army. The Army is an institution typified by hierarchical command and control structure, a characteristic commonly considered to block team learning.

This paper presents the integrated findings from a series of scholarly research papers that focused on understanding when, where and what drives Australian Army team learning.[9] The data was initially collected for the ‘Army as a Learning Organisation’[10] project, and recent statistical modelling that analyses applied contemporary multilevel theory and methods (i.e., quantitative analytic methods specific to nested data) to understand when and where Army team learning improves. Overall, this paper integrates my organisational psychological research analyses into a coherent whole. In doing so, it provides the Army with evidence-based recommendations that will ultimately help enable the Army’s warfighting capabilities. 

What Is Team Learning?

So, what is team learning? I defined team learning as primarily a process.[11] Team learning is the extent to which teams (and individuals) engage in mutual processes, including open discussion of mistakes, sharing and testing lessons learnt, or identifying problems, and viewing everyday work as an opportunity to improve their way of doing work.[12] Team learning in action looks like supervisors or leaders regularly inviting questions and having discussions about what happened; team members volunteering when things have gone wrong or mistakes have happened; and the mistakes or issues being discussed without blame or shame. The team’s shared expectation that their team leader will be open and accepting of potentially difficult issues means that many more problems can be (i) identified and (ii) prevented or reduced. In doing so, the team ensures that common, structural or systemic causes can be identified, and solutions tried, tested and evaluated and, if useful, shared across the team. In sum, this cycle of sharing and learning within a team, as a team, is ‘team learning’. Evidence consistently shows that increasing the rate of team learning leads to a measurable improvement of team outcomes/performance,[13] so much so that many organisational leaders[14] continue to urge teams to learn faster across many different domains, including the leaders in the Australian Army.

As a concept, ‘team learning’ can be, maddeningly,[15] both obvious and vague––obvious when team learning is seen as the simple aggregation of individuals’ learning, and vague when we ask who exactly is doing the learning in ‘team learning’. Does the team learn as a single entity, or is it the simple aggregation of the team members? To help answer these questions, I drew on recent theoretical and methodological advances in organisational behaviour and systems thinking, and defined team learning as being made up of both individual and team elements, simultaneously.[16] Individuals are nested in teams, and teams provide the context within which individuals act. This definition avoids assumptions of reductionism[17] and holism.[18] Taking this perspective, I examined both individual and team level using a multilevel perspective to better understand what, when and where Australian Army teams learn. 

While team learning is typically considered an element (or level) within organisational learning, team learning is focused on the immediate team context within which an individual soldier works. In this sense, team learning does not directly include organisation-wide processes, such as formal knowledge or information management networks. Of course, any team is nested within the larger organisation and is influenced by such information and knowledge systems. Much attention has been focused on organisational learning, including the Army’s formal knowledge systems, organisational culture, and informal/social networks within the Australian Army.[19] Similarly, military psychology has paid close attention to understanding an individual’s shared mental models, and similar cognitive approaches.[20] What has been lacking is a focus on understanding the team’s learning processes within the Australian Army teams. As yet, no research attention has been paid to understanding the contingencies that shape Australian Army team learning. 

How Does Team Learning Enable the Army’s Warfighting Capability?

Military histories are filled with examples of failures to learn,[21] to the point where we now have a military adage that ‘Army always fights the last war’. A classic military example of a failure to learn is encapsulated by Major General John Sedgwick (Union Army, American Civil War, 1887) with his now famous last words: ‘They can’t hit an elephant at this dist …’[22] If Major General Sedgwick had paid attention to his team’s information, checked his assumptions, and then ducked, he may very well have avoided the incoming sniper shot. At its simplest, learning involves an individual gathering new information or skills, and then integrating and synthesising the new knowledge into their established knowledge or skills.[23] Individual learning also includes the learner seamlessly incorporating the new skill or knowledge into the learner’s repertoire of responses. When seen as a simple aggregation of individual learning, team learning appears entirely unproblematic. 

In an intensely competitive environment such as war, maintaining the status quo requires continuous improvement, and this issue is known as the ‘Red Queen problem’.[24] Referring to Alice in Wonderland’s need to run fast to stay on the chess board, the Red Queen problem points to the necessity of working to maintain an even position in a contested environment. This is an important point: in a competition, the absence of learning will lead to defeat. An example of the Red Queen problem was LTCOL Cameron’s observation about the predictability of Australian tank training when deploying to Vietnam War.[25] Similarly, the Red Queen problem also occurs in competitive sport—for example, Olympic cycling. In 2002, the British cycling team had had minimal success in its 79-year history, with only one gold medal in that time period. Six years later, at the Beijing Olympics, the cycling squad won seven out of the 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and did so again at the 2012 London Olympics.[26] How? The British Olympic track cycling team leader realised that, while cycling is a technical and equipment-based sport, the winning edge they sought could not be achieved in a single, substantial technological leap.[27] Instead:

It struck me that we should think small, not big, and adopt a philosophy of continuous improvement through the aggregation of marginal gains. Forget about perfection; focus on progression, and compound the improvements … We searched for small improvements everywhere and found countless opportunities. Taken together, we felt they gave us a competitive advantage … We hired a surgeon to teach our athletes about proper hand-washing to avoid illnesses during the competition (we also decided not to shake hands during the [Beijing] Olympics) … We brought our own mattresses and pillows so our athletes could sleep in the same posture every night.

Perhaps the most powerful benefit is that [focusing on finding improvements] creates a contagious enthusiasm. Everyone starts looking for ways to improve. There’s something inherently rewarding about identifying marginal gains—the bonhomie is similar to a scavenger hunt. People want to identify opportunities and share them with the group. Our team became a very positive place to be.

One caveat is that the whole marginal gains approach doesn’t work if only half the team buy-in. In that case, the search for small improvements will cause resentment. If everyone is committed, in my experience, it removes the fear of being singled out—there is mutual accountability, which is the basis of great teamwork.[28]

The British Olympic track cycling leader’s final point needs emphasising: looking for learning became a team expectation, a norm, and something they all did.[29] In this case, learning was not something that only their leader did, or that only occurred during a formal post-competition review; nor did they just do ‘what they had always done’. It is this process of team learning that I was interested in. Specifically, I focused on understanding when and where Australian Army teams showed a shared sense of learning. 

What Stops Australian Army Teams from Learning?

So, if team learning is so simple and useful, why don’t we all do it all the time? The answer is that team learning is not as unproblematic or straightforward as it first appears. While evidence shows that many factors affect how teams learn, one aspect in particular has been shown to consistently inhibit team learning: namely, hierarchical gaps or a power disparity.[30] At its simplest, a disparity in power differentiates those who are able to make decisions, influence outcomes and control behaviour, compared to those who do not. More precisely, power can be defined as the control over valued resources (which includes physical, economic and social resources).[31] Such disparities can be reflected in differences in job titles, salaries, authority, and access to information and resources. In the military, a hierarchical gap is a significant difference in rank or position between two individuals in the chain of command. 

There is significant and consistent evidence from multiple scholarly studies that show how power differences generate a range of individual socio-cognitive effects, how these effects differ for those with and without power, and how these factors coalesce to inhibit a team learning processes. Evidence shows that larger hierarchical gaps typically inhibit critical team communications and information-sharing processes, which ultimately reduces team learning and team performance. However, there is also recent evidence that shows the specific team-level factors can flip the effect of hierarchical gaps from inhibiting to improving team learning and performance.[32] The team-level factors that help team learning include a collective perspective on team leadership, collective feedback, and specific contexts that reduce team conflict.[33] So overall, while hierarchical gaps typically block important team processes, in some specific circumstances and conditions, hierarchical gaps can also help team learning. Understanding when, where and how these specific conditions might apply in the Australian Army was the focus of my research. 

It is well known that military institutions are ‘deeply hierarchical’ organisations,[34] and the psychological impact of the hierarchical differences can generate real and harmful impacts. For example, in 1996, two Black Hawk helicopters collided and 18 people died.[35] The board of inquiry[36] identified that the large hierarchical authority disparity, termed ‘cockpit gradient’, was a contributing factor in the accident. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Team report identified that the: 

… steep Captain/co-pilot authority gradient between CAPT Bingley and CAPT 7 … the fact that the manoeuvre continues without what appeared to be any interaction from the co-pilot led me to suspect that the cockpit authority gradient affected his ability to communicate his concern … the difficulties … will be further compounded when a very junior pilot is expected to monitor the performance of a senior pilot and QFI such as Black One on 29 November 1996.

Social and organisational power[37] disparity affects us at fundamental, physiological and cognitive levels. Evidence consistently shows that who, when and where we pay attention is determined by perceptions of power.[38] Research shows that increasing power reduces power holders’ social attention, reduces recognition of subordinates’ emotions, reduces trust, and increases the stereotyping of subordinates.[39] Power holders are also typically less motivated to investigate the state of less powerful subordinates’ wellbeing. Power disparity directly affects subordinates’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviours: subordinates are both deferential towards, and resentful of, their higher power team members. These results demonstrate that a hierarchical power structure inhibits many of the critical team processes and behaviours that underpin team learning, such as speaking up, information sharing, identifying mistakes and offering solutions.[40] Recent evidence shows that hierarchical power differences typically inhibit team learning unless specific factors occur which shift this relationship to a positive.[41]

While there is also consistent evidence that clear hierarchical structures help teams by clarifying roles and coordinating communications,[42] much of the evidence relies on individual-level analyses rather than evaluating the team as a whole.[43] In other words, the benefits of a hierarchical command and control structure are typically experienced by the commander or leader, since a clear team structure helps them to do their work. At the same time, the costs of the hierarchical command and control structure are more diffuse and less visible because the inhibiting effects of the hierarchical gaps are experienced by the team members. For example, team members are less likely to speak up about emerging problems when they see a greater power/hierarchical gap between themselves and their team leader. At the same time, the leader is experiencing the benefits of clear team command and control structure. Over time, in teams with larger hierarchical gaps, more problems emerge and are less likely to be dealt with in the team, which ultimately inhibits the team’s learning and performance. This example aims to show that both the negative and positive aspects of Army’s hierarchically structured command and control can occur simultaneously: hierarchical command and control structures can and do provide an individual-level benefit and, at the same time, can inhibit a team’s performance. Further, the individual-level advantages of hierarchical command and control structures should not be assumed to lead to whole-team-level benefits. In other words, the role clarity and communication characteristic of Army’s hierarchical command structures is a necessary but not sufficient condition for team learning and performance. This raises the question: when can hierarchical teams learn?

When Do Hierarchical Teams Learn?

Recent research shows that while hierarchical gaps have a typically negative effect on team outcomes,[44] including team learning,[45] there is one crucial factor that can shift the negative into a positive: namely, a team context. For example, when teams and individuals focus on the collective level (i.e., the ‘we’) rather than on the individual level (i.e., the ‘me’), team learning and performance improves. Specifically, recent thinking around the impact of power disparity in teams has pointed to the vital role of team conflict and cohesion in shaping the consequences of hierarchy for team outcomes.[46] Consistent evidence is emerging that increasing prosocial or collective perspectives within hierarchical teams, either through collective feedback or a leader's collective value, generates a positive effect from hierarchical teams.[47] In other words, power differences within teams do not inevitably lead to poorer team outcomes; instead, poor team outcomes occur in hierarchical teams where leaders are seen to be serve themselves rather than serving their team.[48] Similarly, where team leaders are seen to serve the team rather than themselves (i.e., the ‘we’ rather than the ‘me’), hierarchical teams can outperform other types of team structures.

Australian Army Teams: Hierarchy, Egalitarianism and Deployment

Teams are core to the Army’s capability to generate force. This statement will not surprise any Australian soldier. What might be a surprise, however, is the driving factors that improve team learning in the Australian Army. Specifically, Army teams learn best when there is a shared sense of psychological equality (or egalitarianism).[49] A shared sense of egalitarianism is not merely nice to have; instead, this shared team climate directly improves Army teams’ capacity to learn faster and better. In arguing for a shared sense of psychological equality, I am not arguing for actually flattening the Army’s real hierarchical command structure. On the contrary, my analyses showed that a team’s greatest gains in learning processes were within teams with the largestspread of ranks and with a sense of psychological equality. The critical point is that, even within the same rank structure across teams, Australian Army teams can and do vary in their degree of psychological equality. It is this shared sense of egalitarianism, in the presence of real rank differences in teams, which directly supports and enables team learning. 

The research showed that each Australian Army team can be characterised as having a different degree of shared psychological equality, over and above each individual’s perceptions.[50] Consequently, quantitative follows qualitative evidence showing that the Australian Army is not a monolithic cultural whole. Instead, Army teams differ significantly in shared sense of norms, expectations, processes and practices (particularly in terms of information sharing, identification of mistakes and provision of potential solutions). This then raises questions about what, if any, differences these team environments make. What makes some Australian Army teams more open to psychological equality and learning, when others are less so?

What Drives Team Learning?

Overall, a shared sense of psychological equality enables team learning in the Australian Army. Further, Australian Army teams reported an increased sense of psychological equality (or egalitarianism) when they (i) experienced more deployments and (ii) had a greater spread of ranks/higher degree of hierarchy within a team.[51] This result is not merely a matter of deployment leading to improved team learning;[52] nor was it only that teams made up of higher ranks had improved team learning. A more nuanced process was occurring: teams with a greater spread of ranks[53] in the presence of more deployments generated a greater shared sense of psychological equality. In contrast, teams more similar in rank, so less hierarchical, even when experiencing a similar number of deployments, demonstrated less shared psychological equality and, therefore, less team learning. Further, hierarchical teams with fewer or no deployments showed the lowest levels of egalitarianism. 

Importantly, and somewhat counterintuitively, more deployments did not directly improve team learning. Instead, analyses showed that deployments only shifted team perceptions towards a shared sense of psychological equality when there were more rank differences in the team. So, what might be happening? Recent research shows that the typically negative influence of power differences shifts in response to team context. For example, when team leaders demonstrated a more collective perspective (that is, high-power leaders were seen to serve the team rather than serve themselves), teams had less conflict and improved performance. Essentially, the common theme is that team context matters and, in particular, leaders’ practices and approaches, as well as team context, are critical to support and enable team learning. 

Deployment Shaping Team Learning through Psychological Equality

When ChatGPT was asked, ‘What psychological effects does deployment have on soldiers?’, it provided a summary of only the harmful psychological effects deployment has, including post-traumatic disorder, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, insomnia, relationship problems and adjustment problems.[54] Yet now we are learning that deployment can also have a positive effect—that is, ‘post-traumatic growth’[55] which occurs alongside the damage. Without diminishing the impact of soldiers’ negative deployment experiences, deployment can also prompt sense-making and sense-breaking, and thereby trigger learning and growth. Current thinking shows that Australian Army teams (and team members) learn when on deployment. For example, O’Toole and Talbot[56] discussed social learning in the Australian Army. They observed: 

Most participants acknowledged that operations/deployment provided them with their most powerful learning experience. Operational experience [deployment] was regarded as the ‘pinnacle’ in terms of learning, offering the ‘ultimate’ learning experience. Similarly, participants in an Army Learning Organisation study reported that the learning while on deployment was ‘more real’ than in barracks: ‘In [location] when I went to plan an operation … we were running that ourselves, planning it and running it, and then we actually got to see what the benefits were because there was a final result at the end of it and it was real’. 

While it may be easy to conclude that ‘deployment simply drives teams to learn’, my research shows that the reality is more nuanced. I compared the relative effect of deployments on team learning, and found that deployment by itself was insufficient to trigger team-level learning in all teams, all the time. Instead, what was also needed alongside deployment was a team environment where team members saw themselves, their roles and their contributions as being respected and valued, regardless of rank (defined as psychological equality or egalitarianism). In other words, it was only in those teams that deployed with a range of ranks within the team, which typically generated a greater shared sense of psychological equality, which in turn enabled team learning. Quantitative statistical modelling[57] untangled the nuanced relationship between team ranks, deployment, a shared sense of psychological equality, and team learning. In summary, deployment, in and of itself, was not sufficient for team learning to always occur; however, it was a necessary precursor to enabling team learning within hierarchical teams. Hierarchical teams did learn more after deployment, but only when team members re-evaluated their thinking around ranks, roles and expectations via their shared sense of psychological equality.

Learning-Oriented Leadership

To identify practical recommendations that enable team learning, I investigated the extent to which three different leadership practices predicted an individual’s sense of psychological equality and team learning. Specifically, I compared the relative impact of learning-oriented leadership, transformational leadership and transactional leadership on a sense of psychological equality, and finally on team learning.[58] Learning-oriented leadership[59] was found to generate a greater sense of psychological equality, as well as positively predicting team learning, compared to the more familiar transformational[60] or transactional[61] leadership styles. 

While much attention has been paid to transformational leadership within the Army, little attention has been paid to understanding how learning-oriented leadership influences teams and individuals, either directly or indirectly. Overall, the results showed that learning-oriented leadership had twice the positive impact of transformational leadership in generating psychological equality. For team learning, learning-oriented leadership was considerably more important, by almost a magnitude of 10, compared to transformational leadership. The results showed that learning-oriented leadership led to improved psychological equality and was far more important than transformational leadership style to generating team learning. 

Rank had different effects on psychological equality and team learning. For team learning, rank had a direct and positive effect.[62] So the higher their rank, the more likely it was that the individual felt the team was learning. A senior officer saw more team learning than a private soldier. Interestingly, rank had no direct effect on psychological equality.[63] In other words, a sense of psychological equality was not dependent on an individual’s rank: a private soldier was just as likely as a senior officer to feel psychologically equal. The pattern of results showed that rank did not directly determine psychological equality; instead, learning-oriented leadership (and, to a lesser extent, transformational leadership) determined psychological equality, which in turn enabled team learning. Typically (but not invariably), higher ranked individuals experienced more learning-oriented leadership, and so were more likely to see team learning. 

Evaluating the effect of deployment on psychological equality and team learning showed that deployments directly and positively affected individuals’ perceptions of psychological equality. This finding holds true even when team-level deployment does not directly improve team-level shared psychological equality and team learning. The positive effect of deployments upon individuals’ perception was significant, even when the learning-oriented leadership style was taken into account. Further, when looking at the effect of deployments on team learning, the results showed that psychological equality was the mechanism through which deployments positively influenced team learning. These results indicate a complex relationship between rank, deployment, leadership style and team characteristics in team learning. In simple terms, learning-oriented leadership directly affects individuals’ psychological equality, which in turn enables individuals’ team learning, and this relationship holds for all ranks. 

Recommendations

While the quantitative modelling analysed for this paper drew upon deployment experience, its relevance extends more broadly. Specifically, the studies show that the real hierarchical differences found in Army chain of command do not inevitably hinder team learning. Notably, Army can take practical steps to reduce a key structural and organisational blocker to team learning. The research provides an evidence base for Army leaders and trainers to develop programs or mechanisms to improve psychological equality and team learning in the absence of deployment. Identifying necessary preconditions for team learning in the Australian Army supports practical recommendations, which will ultimately help the Australian Army achieve its aim of ‘Accelerated Warfare’. The following recommendations are provided in support of this effort: 

Recommendation: Inculcate Learning-Oriented Leadership Practices

Army leadership training doctrine and delivery centres (e.g., Royal Military College, Australian Defence Force Academy, and Australian Defence College) should review their current practices to emphasise and highlight the utility of applying learning-oriented leadership practices. An approach may be to build a competency-based rating scale anchored in demonstrated behaviours (see list below). Ideally, the review would generate criteria for demonstrating learning-oriented leadership when considering rewards, promotions and celebrations. Other mechanisms to reinforce learning-oriented leadership practices could be implemented through Defence’s EMPower mentoring and coaching program, as well as via short courses on Campus for self-guided learning that outline the specific behaviours and practices. Examples of successful and—even more importantly—unsuccessful team learning might be identified and disseminated using the Australian Army Research Centre (AARC) seminar series. These measures could be supplemented by Army leaders sharing their own learning journeys, as Thorburn[64] did on Army’s The Cove website. Specific activities that mark learning-oriented leadership include the following:

• Share information quickly and easily. 
• Regularly invite team members’ views and contributions—e.g., ‘catch the team doing something good’—and reward desired behaviours or patterns in teams and individuals. 
• Be clear about what failure is blameworthy versus praiseworthy:
  • blameworthy failure is, e.g., an individual choosing to deviate from a prescribed practice or process; 
  • praiseworthy failure is, e.g., testing or experimenting to understand a complex environment or process better.
• Look for opportunities to learn for yourself and your team, and set an example when you need to learn or have made a mistake.
• Reward individuals in front of the team when they share a problem or spot an error. 
• Formally and informally analyse failures and share the lessons learnt, as a team. 

Recommendation: Identify the Team-Level Benefits of Shared Deployment and Build on the Benefits

If it has not already occurred, team-level benefits of deployments should be undertaken as part of the lessons learnt processes undertaken by the Army Knowledge Centre. The results of this effort could inform the collective training doctrine that underpins the Army training continuum. Building on the positive experiences emerging from deployments at the team level, as well as considering the damage and adverse effects on individuals, will help support greater team learning. To reinforce learning, Campus could be developed to deliver refresher training on the elements that make up team learning. Seminars exploring this topic could also be developed and disseminated via the AARC seminar series and through other more informal mechanisms such as The Cove for personnel’s reflections on this topic. This recommendation becomes more important when the deployment rotations are winding down or changing. 

Measures that are proposed under this heading are:

• Identify the ways in which deployments changed and improved teams’ expectations, processes and procedures. If not already done, incorporate the changed expectations and processes into team standard operating procedures. Capture the benefits and learning already experienced within teams who have deployed to share with new starters/recruits.
• When teams do not (or are not likely) to deploy, invest time and effort into intense team-level training which simulates shared threats and hardships, for a sustained time period. This will give team members opportunities to re-evaluate their own roles and responsibilities, identify the collective perspective, and provide sufficient feedback to shift perspectives of team members’ power and roles.
• Increase the range of ranks within teams when on deployment or during training opportunities. This will give all ranks the opportunity to learn respect for each other’s roles within the team, identify interdependencies, and see how respect helps the team perform. 

Recommendation: Instil a Shared Sense of Psychological Equality within Army Teams

This recommendation is more complex to achieve than the preceding proposals. One option may be for the Army Knowledge Centre and training institutions to distil specific examples of what a shared sense of psychological equality would look like in a range of contexts, and to draw illustrative boundaries about what it is and how it looks. Such efforts would need to acknowledge the precedence of the formal chain of command in a military context. The doctrine, examples or use cases could then support respect for all team members. Importantly, such efforts could align with the covenant between Army members and the nation which provides that ‘I believe in trust, loyalty and respect for my Country, my mates and the Army’. Inculcating such respect would also align with other Defence initiatives such as One Defence and similar programs. 

In implementing this recommendation, respect should be emphasised because respect for all ranks and roles—regardless of rank—is a definition of psychological equality. Conceptually, respect can be owed (e.g., by virtue of rank) and can be earned (e.g., by way of competence and contribution during deployments or, alternatively, during training simulations).[65] Owed respect helps us feel included and valued as part of the team and organisation, while earned respect recognises specific qualities or can be achieved through the following measures:

• Establish a firm baseline of owed respect for all personnel. Every soldier should feel that their dignity is recognised and respected. This is especially important for soldiers of more junior rank. Respect is infinite; giving owed respect is not a zero-sum game. 
• See respect as a time saver, not a time waster. Improving respect is a function of how you do what you are already doing. Increasing the respect in team relationships does not add more time or effort into your current communication within your team (e.g., being polite). 
• Identify how respect is earned within the team; the specific tasks or roles that earn respect vary by team, role and function. 
  • Common ways for leaders to show respect are to delegate important tasks, to remain open to advice, and to publicly back your staff and teammates in critical situations.
• Think about the mix of owed respect and earned respect within your team. Is the current mix appropriate to generate a shared sense of egalitarianism? Is earned respect generated for appropriate or beneficial behaviours within the team?
• Know when efforts to be respectful go wrong; if efforts are inconsistent or haphazard, soldiers will see such attempts as manipulative or disingenuous. If a supervisor or superior officer only offers respect in the presence of others, then their words or actions will appear to be insincere. 
• Make sure you give earned respect when it is deserved. If praise is given for undeserving actions, it will appear to be tokenistic and will be counterproductive. 

Conclusion

This paper offers a new and nuanced understanding of how a fundamental Army characteristic, hierarchical command and control structure, can become an enabler of team learning. Broadly speaking, hierarchical teams learn best after deployment, with learning-oriented or collective-focused leadership, because these factors help teams to generate a shared sense of psychological equality. My proposition is that learning-oriented leadership and deployment are team contextual factors that may let team members re-evaluate their assumptions and perceptions about power differences in their teams. In turn, this sense-making and breaking can generate a shared sense of psychological equality, finally enabling team learning. This work extends our current understanding of how to develop teams, individuals and leaders, a key theme within the AFRF. 

Based on the analyses, recommendations are made to improve key factors that enable team learning. These include increasing the degree—or practice—of learning-oriented leadership, and improving a shared sense of psychological equality. Psychological equality may be enabled through two mechanisms: (i) identify the positive and shared experience of deployment effect on teams, and replicate it during training, and (ii) instil a sense of respect in Army teams. Respect is a critical and fundamental component of psychological equality. While the recommendations offer a way forward, any such effort should include evaluation and review mechanisms to ensure that the planned actions have the expected outcomes. This is particularly important when grappling with abstract concepts such as shared psychological equality, learning-oriented leadership and respect.

Learning-oriented leadership practices or training experiences, which shift team members’ expectations and perceptions of rank and power, improve team learning, both directly and indirectly. Ultimately, Army team learning will be enabled by learning-oriented leadership and a robust and shared sense of psychological equality based on respect. Teams that learn will better identify problems, share solutions, develop and implement improvements and find that 1 per cent competitive advantage across the many systems, equipment, materiel and procedures in Army. Taking active measures to achieve this outcome is critical, particularly if the Australian Army slows its operational tempo, thus reducing the opportunity for its members to experience deployments. Regardless of whether the Australian Army is postured for expeditionary operations or for national security priorities closer to home, however, the need for effective team learning is acute if the Australian Army is to accelerate its warfighting capabilities.

Army Commentary

Dr Chris Stothard’s paper suggests the Australian Army can better enable team learning in hierarchical environments through the generation of a learning-oriented leadership style, and a shared sense of psychological equality through deployments.

The evidence produced argues hierarchal teams inherently inhibit team learning but these trends are countered by Army’s approach to teaming for deployments. Human and environmental drivers influence the context of teaming and the chances of success; leadership is an integral part of any team, and the reader is encouraged to differentiate between leadership and hierarchical command structures. Not all leaders are commanders, and not all commanders are leaders. 

As an organisation, we have made enormous progress in how we ‘red team’ our plans and subsequently capture lessons learnt. This paper highlights the importance of these processes in team learning in the context of operational deployments, and a sense of shared psychological equality that stems from this endeavour. Substituting the deployment for any learned experience—where there is pressure to succeed, and defined metrics for success— allows us to consider a wider range of scenarios. 

From an organisational perspective, the author’s recommendations already form a part of Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy, in particular Army’s culture of Good Soldiering. However, some of the author’s assertions challenge the status quo—in particular, formal leadership training delivered by the ADF Training Continuum. Therefore, I encourage the reader to consider their own leadership style and approach to learning when reading this paper.

Developing people capability is a continual yet critical challenge. Army has never been more diverse than it is now and there are multitudes of scenarios where we rapidly formulate ‘teams of teams’. Dr Stothard’s paper evokes notions of the role of leadership and command structures in team success. It is up to us to consider appropriate frameworks to enable team success.

Christopher Sharp

Warrant Officer Class One

About the Author

Dr Chris Stothard is a computational social/behavioural scientist and recent PhD graduate from the University of Adelaide. In 2021, Dr Stothard was awarded a University Medal and Dean’s Commendation for PhD excellence for the thesis ‘What Helps Team Learning? Egalitarianism, Hardship, and Leadership in Australian Army Teams’. Dr Stothard’s research draws together multilevel statistical modelling, systems thinking, applied social psychology, management/organisational sciences, and data science to unpick the nuanced relationships of factors which enable team learning in hierarchical teams.

Endnotes