Understanding and Retaining Talent in the Surface Warfare Community

Abstract

The Navy Surface Warfare (SWO) Community provides a vital, sophisticated capability to address increasingly dynamic and unpredictable threats around the world. Community leaders have devised and implemented a number of progressive changes to enhance the SWO profession and to help retain talent. The construct talent remains somewhat ambiguous, however, and the most talented officers appear to be those receiving the highest rankings and strongest endorsements on their fitness reports (FITREPs). A key problem is, FITREPs are subject to increasing criticism regarding bias, subjectivity and foci on tenure over merit and current performance over future potential. Indeed, the Navy is in the process of reevaluating its performance evaluation process now. Moreover, results from our previous research suggest strongly that talent is a highly situated and nuanced concept, with key characteristics likely to differ with rank, role, job and other factors that vary over time. Hence it remains uncertain whether the talent we retain currently is the best to meet our present, much less our future, needs. This qualitative study addresses the issue directly. Eschewing the idea of using deduction and quantitative analysis through one or more top-down theoretic models of talent approaches that presume a detailed understanding of what talent is and how to measure it we choose instead to employ qualitative methods inductively and to build up a grounded understanding of SWO talent. We employ very well-established, grounded theory building methods, which provide a systematic, scientific process to develop an understanding inductively, from the data themselves. Moreover, we focus specifically on people who have been identified as talented beyond the current FITREP process.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2018
Accession Number
AD1060201

Entities

People

  • Mark E. Nissen
  • Simona L. Tick

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Active Duty
  • Aircrafts
  • Business Administration
  • California
  • Data Analysis
  • Employment
  • Information Science
  • Knowledge Management
  • Littoral Combat Ships
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Organizations
  • Naval Operations
  • Naval Personnel
  • Naval Warfare
  • Navy
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Psychology
  • Public Policy
  • Students
  • Surface Warfare
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Training
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Military Leadership and Professional Education.
  • Strategic Security Studies
  • Theoretical Analysis.