AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
problems where is usually rigid hierarchy as barrier of
developing leader’s potential. They found out that the best army
organization know necessity of the quality leadership in all
levels.
Good leader must change mind setup, which help to improve
thinking and behavior of potential leader. To become a good
leader, Robbins, Coulter (2004) recommend three abilities:
technical skills includes relevant knowledge of adequate
technics and technologies;
human skills are focused on interpersonal communication,
motivation, leading or mentoring of people;
conceptual skills target on conceptual, complex and critical
thinking, connected to strategic areas.
On the way of preparing good commanders, there is relevant to
use meta-competence model (Schwartzman, 2003). Meta-
competence is human ability to obtain new competencies as
personal development. This model focuses on adjustment of
commanders in process of developing and cultivating leader’s
strategic skills. It includes six specific areas, which help to
commander’s improvement:
1.
identity is process of feedback collection, that helps to
self-awareness of personal skills in present form;
2.
mental agility defines recognition ability in specific
environment to reach effective performance. Base for this
effectiveness is observing of specific areas (with high
level of ambiguity and uncertainty), bringing relevant
cognitive processes and improvisation;
3.
cross-cultural savvy represents need of orientation in
inter-culture affairs to understand different cultures from
various point of views (e.g. religion, history, geographic,
social or economy);
4.
interpersonal maturity leads to application of teaching,
couching, mentoring of all participating persons. Results
of these activities must be shared with relevant entities;
5.
world-class warrior is usually rated as the simplest area,
divided from technical and tactical competencies during
army duties and based on various army texts such e.g.
army history, army arts, or simulations of army activities;
6.
professional astuteness reflects army as kind of mission,
where is applied liability and diplomatic as key factors on
the way of well-advised realization activities.
2 Materials and methods
To test in how far sleep deprivation leads to diminished ToM
functioning akin to the symptoms of autism, 25 male students
from the Czech military academy in Brno, Czech Republic, were
recruited. Participation was voluntary, and participants had a
possibility to opt out at any stage during the experiment. Before
the start of the experiment participants signed a form of consent
and were informed of what would happen to them. The study
was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki,
and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of Brno
University of Defence, Faculty of Military Leadership.
For purpose of the research, there is defined hypothesis that
“sleep deprivation does not lead to impairment of ToM”. To
verify it, there was applied ANOVA and T-test. All 25
participants finished the experiment although it must be noted
that several individuals who signed up for the experiment opted
out before the experiment had begun. We tested also for physical
markers of fatigue using a Medicore Max pulse and a blood
pressure monitor (separate measures for the Eyes test and the
questionnaire described. Statistical analysis was done using IBM
SPSS 24.
3 Results
Participants (N=25) were tested before and after a night of acute
sleep deprivation (21:00 and 04:00) for both ToM and physical
markers of fatigue. To test participants’ ToM, we distributed a
Czech translation of the “The Eyes Test” (MacGillavry, 2018),
which was designed to be sensitive enough to detect deficiencies
in ToM amongst high-functioning individuals with autism and
Asperger’s syndrome. The test consists of 36 photos of eyes
(taken from different individuals), which express a certain
emotion. Each photo comes with four emotions of which the
participant has to select the correct one. In addition, we
administered a short questionnaire which presented participants
with a series of profession specific cases for which they had to
decide, on a five-point Likert scale, in how far the outcome of
the actions of one of the main actors can be viewed as his/her
personal responsibility.
This questionnaire was designed to specifically addresses
inabilities in metalizing with relation to hindsight bias. The
correlation between hindsight bias (the inability to adopt the
point of view of someone else, or the self, during past events due
to current knowledge of the outcome of events; I knew it all
along!) and ToM deficiencies has previously been reported
(Bernstein et al., 2007; Birch, Bernstein, 2007). We therefore
assumed that ToM deficiencies should register on a profession
specific test which related to decision making in crisis situations.
The test consists of 10 cases (4 of which were decoy cases)
which were split into two parts, part A and part B (5 cases (2
decoy-cases) each). Half of the group (N=13) were provided
with part A in the evening and part B in the morning. The other
half of the group got part B first and part A second. Both tests
were administered before and after a night of acute sleep
deprivation. We reverse scored answers to cases with negative
outcomes in order to keep the measure constant.
We tested the data from the Eyes Test for normality using the K-
S test for:
evening condition: D(25)=0.12, p>0.05
morning condition, D(25)=0.17, p>0.05
Both gained value indicate, that the data from both conditions
approximate normality.
Subsequently we compared the two conditions:
Evening: Mean=25,60; Standard error=0,592
Morning: Mean=25,84; Standard error=0,754
On these values there was applied a Paired Samples T-Test:
On this basis we conclude that, in our sample, there is no
significant effect of one night of acute sleep deprivation on
participants’ ability to successfully fill out the Eyes Test.
Answers to the questionnaire were analyzed using a mixed
ANOVA design which indicates that there is no significant
effect of sleep deprivation within our test group on performance
on a short hindsight-bias questionnaire.
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