West Point: Critica Incident Of Leadership

Usable critical incident descriptions of leadership were collected from followers who were freshmen cadets in basic training (n = 400) at the U. S. Military Academy. A content analysis revealed several situational and behavior categories, both typifying and discriminating between "good" and "bad" leadership descriptions. The most notable findings were (1) the concordance between results obtained from the critical incident technique and from rating scales of leadership, and (2) the high correspondence between behaviors identified in good leadership descriptions and lacking (or absent) in bad leadership descriptions. The results support the notion of setting specific leadership typologies; future research using this technique is also proposed.