nfluence of informal interpersonal relationships on the cohesion of the military team

Ganshin Sergey Olegovich

Organizing and regulating interrelations inside military teams is a domain widely reflected in laws, legal acts, regulations and other kind of regulatory documents. Nevertheless, that domain is not entirely regulated. It is technically not possible to totally exclude informal interpersonal relations taking into account that each serviceman has his unique emotional response to any event in the life of his team. Those men are free to find their motivation to serve and they have the right to build their own attitude regarding the current situation, their fellow servicemen, their current task or the adversary. Thereby any lack of control could be a source to unhealthy feelings and opinions. Usually, more the military activity is delicate and dangerous, lower is the probability to witness any non-regulated attitude. That has a goal to take all the psychosocial processes under control and make them predictable to ensure rapid communication and interaction. At the same time this doesn’t exclude any informal attitudes as a psychosocial phenomenon. At the same time, formalizing business processes in military activities can lead to a lower coherence of the group and lower reliability of individual servicemen. That can result in a lower interest of the personnel to the tasks of the unit and to their fellows. That can also lower the normal initiative and implication level and decrease the resistance in front of the enemy’s military and informational influence. All that means that the team unity based on non-regulated attitudes has a rather ambiguous influence and can assist as well as discourage the efficient completion of the assigned tasks. In order to define the influence of informal interpersonal attitudes on the teams’ unity, an experimental study was launched. It confirmed a strong correlation in that domain.

Keywords:team unity, cohesion, military team, military personnel, servicemen, behavior in combat