Influence of joint activities on the group cohesiveness of the military team

Ganshin Sergey Olegovich

The usual scientific research approach concerning the team unity is to consider it as a combination of informal mutual attitudes inside a group (fellow feelings or antipathy) that is of little real use to assess the ability of a combat unit to fulfil any assigned tasks. Indeed, the effective combat training performance indicators showing that the unit is ready to act in common are not taken into consideration in that case. Those informal mutual relations cannot be used to appreciate the capability of the unit to act as an organized professional working force. In order to assess it the key combat training activity indicators are also necessary. The indicator of the unity in combat group action is the capacity of the team to efficiently lead fire, to actively cooperate being proactive at the same time, to maintain the offensive impulse and to keep relentless defense always staying disciplined. All this lets achieve psychological and tactical superiority over the enemy. The scientific and combat practice of the national and foreign armies has accumulated a fairly important knowledge about team unity and its influence on the behavior of soldiers in battle conditions. That practice demonstrates the major importance of the specificities of military activities when building the team unity. At the same time the unity itself has different parameters depending on the kind of activities performed. To establish the influence of cooperative activities on a team unity an experimental study was done. It confirmed a strong correlation between the intensity of combat training as well as the joint operation of technical means on one side and the team unity on the other. It was established that the unity of military teams during any formal (service) activities was bigger than that during informal (leisure) activities. That shows the focus of military personnel above all on fulfilling the tasks assigned to them. The systematic knowledge of the military team’s unity factors should allow the commanders to make effective forecasts, to plan and to optimize the control of the military personnel’s behavior in order to efficiently fulfill their objectives.

Keywords:activity, team unity, military team, military personnel, behavior in battle