Abstract
Leaders in the United States Navy have an organizational structure, service regulations,
and training and education that govern ethical and legal boundaries that orient and drive
leadership and subordinate behavioral expectations. Through the leadership and
organizational hierarchy called the chain of command, members of the Navy receive
guidance and orders to complete their mission as well as exercise dissent and
disagreement. Over the last 30 plus years, the Navy has conducted two studies on poor
leadership behavior and found no systemic cause that could explain why individuals and
positional leaders deviated from the established norms and values of the organization.
While conducting these studies, the Navy, like most leadership research, remained
focused on the leader throughout their investigations. Widening the aperture and looking
at influences beyond the leader, this study explored how personnel expectations and
organizational change act as agents of influence. By comparing the behavior described in
Krulak’s (1986/2016) article “A Soldier’s Dilemma” to the experiences and expectations
of retired Navy Personnel, participants expressed a shift from individual impact to
organizational/environmental influences that Krulak warned leadership to avoid. Through
the examination of 16 interviews, participants described leader-follower expectations and
change that resulted in the erosion of trust and the evolution of a zero-defect culture.
More importantly, none of the participants recalled any education on the power of
expectations, and the described environment caused some junior officers to focus on
surviving Command rather than becoming their best as a Commanding Officer and a
leader.
Keywords: expectations, change, zero-defect culture, trust, leadership