#1310 1942 · British Army (War Office) · Military officer selection
The British Army stopped picking officers by interview and gave them a leaderless team
问题
Officers picked by a short interview board kept failing training or breaking down under real command
背景
By 1941 Britain's army had a roughly 25 percent officer shortfall and a high failure and breakdown rate among cadets who had been selected mainly on a brief interview before a panel of senior officers judging manner, accent, and background rather than any real test of leadership.
Colonel Vinden's investigation led the War Office to bring in psychiatrists Wilfred Bion, John Rickman, and Eric Trist, who replaced the interview with a multi-day battery culminating in the leaderless group task: a group given a real physical problem, such as getting a team and equipment across an obstacle, with no leader appointed, while trained observers watched who actually organized the group under pressure.
换别人会怎么做
Keep the traditional officer interview board, judging candidates on manner, background, and a short conversation, the method the army had always used and that was producing the casualty and breakdown numbers driving the reform.
他们看到了什么
A polished answer to 'how would you lead' was worthless, Bion's team saw — the real test was how a candidate behaved when nobody told them leadership was being watched, so they removed the appointed leader entirely.
那一手
From February 1942 the new War Office Selection Boards ran every officer candidate through days of leaderless group exercises, aptitude tests, and structured observation instead of a single interview, scoring candidates on how they actually behaved while leading, following, or being ignored by an uncooperative team assembled from strangers.
为什么管用
A leaderless task works because it cannot be rehearsed for: nobody knows in advance whether they'll be expected to lead, follow, or be ignored, so the behavior observers see is the candidate's genuine reaction to unstructured group pressure, the same pressure real combat command would apply, rather than a coached answer to a predictable interview question.
值了多少
From 1943-45 the Officer Cadet failure rate fell to 8 percent; a follow-up found 76 percent of WOSB officers rated fully satisfactory.
什么时候会失灵
The method needs psychologically trained observers who can read group dynamics accurately; untrained observers can mistake mere talkativeness for leadership, and a task that doesn't resemble the real pressures of the job being selected for measures nothing more useful than the interview it replaced.
后来呢
WOSB became the direct model for the modern corporate assessment center once its psychologists, including Harold Bridger, moved into civilian consulting after the war and rebuilt the same leaderless-task method for graduate recruitment at firms like Unilever.
资料来源
- [1]War Office Selection Boards 1942-46British Psychological Society, 2015explore.bps.org.uk
- [2]War Office Selection BoardsWikipedia, 2024en.wikipedia.org