Grit, or the passionate pursuit of long-term goals, is an important predictor of performance and success across various domains, including within some military contexts. Whether grit predicts such outcomes at a military service academy during a multi-year period of prolonged uncertainty, however, is unknown. Using institutional data collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic onset, we assessed how well grit, physical fitness test scores, and entrance examination scores predicted performance in academic, military, and physical domains, as well as on-time graduation for 817 cadets from the West Point Class of 2022. This cohort spent more than 2 years of their time at West Point functioning under the uncertainty of pandemic-related conditions. Multiple regression results showed that grit, fitness test, and entrance examination scores were all significant predictors of performance outcomes in the academic, military, and physical domains. Results from binary logistic regression showed that, in addition to physical fitness, grit scores significantly predicted graduation from West Point and accounted for unique variance. Consistent with results from pre-pandemic studies, grit was an important predictor of performance and success for West Point cadets even under pandemic conditions.

You would be hard pressed to find a room full of office typists in any present-day corporate setting. Office typists (who reached an apex in the mid-20th century) employed fast typing skills, a mastery of language and grammar, and the ability to take real-time dictation through shorthand. However, with the advent of personal computers and email, the speed of business required leaders to improve their own typing and communication skills. Those that embraced these skills quickly outperformed those that failed to adapt. Today, office typists are obsolete; their skills are now integral to everyone in an organization. Similarly, today’s business leaders rely on teams of data scientists to manage, analyze, and model large amounts of data to inform decisions. Will data scientists one day sustain a fate similar to office typists? It may be too early to make such a prediction. Nonetheless, to compete in the near-future global market, leaders–military and civilian alike–will need to adapt these skills and become data literate with deep knowledge of data capabilities.

Intentional Self-Regulation (ISR) – broadly defined, goal-directed behavior – is an important skill in promoting positive and adaptive development across the life span. The Selection-Optimization-Compensation (SOC) model of ISR describes goal directed behavior among children, adolescents, and adults. This study used an inductive and deductive approach to examine the factor structure of a SOC measure among 4909 cadets from the 2018-2023 graduating classes of the United States Military Academy. An 11-item, SOC measure was administered to all first-year Cadets during Cadet Basic Training, and analyses compared results of an exploratory factor analysis with multiple, theoretically suggested structures using confirmatory factor analysis procedures. Findings suggest that ISR consisted of three structures: Execution (composed of selection and optimization items), persistence, and compensation. Future research should explore the developmental trajectories of these three ISR structures and determine the relationship between ISR and important performance outcomes within the leadership context.

Intentional Self-Regulation (ISR) or, more broadly, goal-directed behavior, is an essential skill in promoting positive and adaptive healthy development across the life-span. The Selection-Optimization-Compensation (SOC) model of ISR has described positive development among children, adolescents, and adults. However, the current SOC measure does not quantify the lived experiences and interindividual differences resulting from experience, training, and organizational culture. Using data from a multi-cohort, multi-year study among Cadets at West Point, this dissertation employed concepts from the decision making and risk-taking literature to conceptualize and test a model that describes interindividual differences in ISR based on lived experiences within a leadership context where risk is a vital decision-making consideration. Data were analyzed using a latent growth curve model to assess the association between ISR and risk-taking propensity, and to test the ideas that lived experiences are associated with differences in the ISR developmental trajectory, and that this trajectory is associated with important institutional outcomes. The results of this analysis suggest that within this sample risk-taking propensity is positively associated with intentional self-regulation above and beyond the average intentional self-regulation growth curve. Results of this research are discussed in relation to optimizing Cadet development, improving our understanding of contextual factors that influence ISR, and the importance of ISR and risk-taking within the military leadership context.

The military environment presents an intersection between a setting featuring unavoidable risk and individual risk-taking propensity; prior work suggests risk-takers have positive and negative outcomes here, and messaging about risk-taking in the military is mixed. The current study used social identity theory to examine how self-reported risk propensity related to three identities/outcomes among cadets at the U.S. Military Academy: attributes of an archetypal “Model Soldier” (physical and military excellence), “Model Student” (grade point average, service positions, and behavior), and Military Values (bravery, duty, and resilience). Structural equation modeling demonstrated that risk-taking was positively related to our Model Soldier and Military Values identities but negatively associated with being a Model Student. Additionally, high-risk-taking cadets were viewed by peers and instructors as confident but prone to judgment, self-discipline, and insight difficulties, suggesting overconfidence among risk-takers. Quantified as a difference between confidence and self-discipline, judgment, and insight, overconfidence mediated the relationship between risk-taking and the three identities, suggesting overconfidence drives both positive and negative associations with risk-taking. Military and leadership implications are presented.

Contemporary models of character development emphasize that character is a malleable outcome of individual-context relations. Positive character, or character virtues, vary in relation to specific contextual circumstances requiring the enactment of specific behaviors that are morally appropriate and necessary for positive individual-context relations to occur. The exploration of the features of character virtue development that arise in specific contexts points to the role of educational institutions as key settings wherein character develops, including higher education institutions whose fundamental mission is to train leaders of character. This potential value for understanding how leaders of character are “produced” within such an institution was a key basis of Project Arête, a study of the pathways of character virtue development and leadership traversed by the cadets within the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. We discuss the theoretical and methodological ideas we have used within Project Arête to shape our assessments of character development and leadership, and focus on issues involved in the design, measurement, and analysis of developmental changes in individuals, context, and individual- context relations.