From External Dependence to Internal Mastery: The Role of Capsule Courses in Enhancing Military Trainee Performance

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine if a basic military training programme (BMT) with an embedded set of focused “Personality Development Capsule Courses” would help to change an external to an internal locus of control (LOC) and, consequently, operational performance. The intervention is based on 1) Rotter's social-learning conceptualization of LOC and 2) transactional models of stress and coping, focusing on 1) self-awareness, 2) retraining of causal attributions, and 3) effort-based problem solving. A quasi-experimental, mixed-methods research design was used to compare a tutored group of 111 students who were given the capsules, with an untutored control group of nine students who received the regular technical syllabus. Psychological homogeneity was confirmed at baseline by an independent-samples t-test (t(118) = 1.82, p = 0.071) which revealed no significant difference in LOC between groups. The tutored group made significant progress in all measures of internal LOC, in reliance upon problem-focused coping and in quicker recovery from setbacks and more confident decision-making, while the untutored group stagnated. The intervention also helped reduce a significant pre-course difference between male and female trainees in confidence. The results corroborate recent military-resilience experiments and go beyond them by separating LOC from the other dimensions of military-resilience into a trainable, performance-relevant mechanism in compressed “capsule” formats.