Background
There is an impression in the US Army that who you’ve worked for has as much of an impact on career advancement as how well you performed in your jobs. Could having a good evaluation from a well-know 4-star general carrying more sway than an outstanding evaluation from a relatively unknown Senior Career Civilian?
The Army conducts annual promotion boards to select officers who will be promoted to the next rank. Each board is made of a specific group of officers who outrank those being considered. *
Board members must primarily distinguish who should be selected for promotion by reading a collection of each officer’s written evaluations, appropriately called the Officer Evaluation Reports (OER). The OER consists of 2 main sections with a narrative of performance and potential that a board member uses to judge the officer: the rater section (the officer’s boss) and the senior rater section (the boss’ boss). Typically, an OER is completed annually and when an officer is being considered for promotion to the next rank, he/she has 4-6 OERs in their file while in their current rank.
Question?
How much does who you work for (a General Officer) impact an Army officer’s promotion potential?
Network Analysis
SNA can visually depict the relationship between eligible officers and general officers. Not only looking at the eligible officers and the number of connections to general officers, but looking at the network of each general to see how many connected eligible officers were selected for promotion. Other attributes to include and incorporate:
1.
Overall file strength (based on OERs)
2.
Total number of months deployed
3.
Rank of the General (1 to 4 stars)
What is the network, and what will be the most important network measures?
The network is the connection of eligible officers to general officers (two-way connections). The network would not include connections between eligible officers or connections between general officers.
Important measures:
-
number of degrees of an eligible officer to the
General Officer population
-
Does the rank of the connected general officer
have an impact (a 4-star vs. a 1-star)?
- Use Egonets of the generals.
-
Several centrality measures for further exploration:
look what other attributes seem to impact promotion selection? Is strength of file more important? Are deployments more important?
What data do you need?
It would be hard (would take time) to get because it would require approval by the Army’s Human Resource Command. Once approval was given, all data can be gotten from personnel records (OERs for who were previous raters and senior raters; OERs for strength of file; other records for number of months deployed). All data would involve manually inputting the connections and attributes.
For simplicity, I would look at a sample of the officer population: a specific branches’ promotion to a specific rank at a specific time (i.e. all Armor Officers eligible for Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) in Fiscal Year 19).
What will the SNA help you do?
This research could support or rebuff the question posed above. The results would impact how officers are assigned. The Army has a centralized assignment process and takes several factors into consideration for follow-on jobs, but the input of the individual is often one of the top. Results from this network analysis would influence how officers order their preferences for subsequent jobs in order to be competitive for future promotions.
*Note: Prior to 2010, when the board results were published, the Army also published who were the board members. Unfortunately, the Army no longer does that -- it would be fascinating to see how connections of the eligible population to individual board member (previously worked for) impacted promotion rates.
Previous Research
Bonnie A. Nardi, Steve Whittaker, Heinrich Schwarz. “It's not what you know it's who you know”
https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/741/650
Antonio-Rafael Ramos-Rodríguez, José-Aurelio Medina-Garrido, José-Daniel Lorenzo-Gómez, José Ruiz-Navarro. “What you know or who you know? The role of intellectual and social capital in opportunity recognition.”
https://doi.org/10.1177/0266242610369753
Snell, Scott A. “ Social capital and strategic HRM: It's who you know”
HR. Human Resource Planning; New York Vol. 22, Iss. 1, (1999): 62-65.
1 comment:
Interesting research question. I would love to see it published, but somehow, I doubt that the Pentagon wold be in favor of that much sunlight into the process! Attribute are well chosen, but I'm sure you could incorporate more for some deeper insights. Would have liked some more discussion of different specific network measures and how they might influence your study. You would also need to start with a manageable subset to test hypotheses. All-in-all, this is a really interesting potential project.
Ben and RT
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