Effects of leadership

This is a study of the effects of leadership-how the actions of leaders affect the behavior of their followers. The leaders in this study are the commissioned and noncommissioned officers of several Army training companies, and the followers are the men who received their basic training in these companies at Fort Dix, New Jersey in the Spring of 1952. Although each company was confronted with the same tasks under comparable physical and social conditions, the actions of the leaders varied considerably. In the pages to follow it will be shown that these variations in leadership had pronounced and consistent effects on the behavior of the trainees.

Many characteristics of this study result from the fact that the de sign and the analysis were carried out by different persons. The ques tionnaires on which it is based were constructed and administered by Arthur M. Arkin, M. D. and Thomas M. Gellert, M. D. when they were in military service at Fort Dix, Dr. Arkin as Chief of the Mental Health Consultation Service and Dr. Gellert as a psychiatric social worker. Dr. Arkin and Dr. Gellert were seeking to investigate some psycho analytic hopotheses about the nature of responses to leadership, but their military service ended before they were able to process and an alyze their data.