Top administrators of the United States Military Academy at West Point granted me ac- cess to study teams preparing for and participating in the Sandhurst Competition—an in- ternational, team-based military competition held annually at West Point. The Sandhurst Competition has a long history at West Point with rich tradition. This history begin in 1967 when the leaders of Great Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) sent a British officer’s sword to the leaders of West Point and directed that the sword should serve as a prize awarded to the champion of a team-based competition. The instructions delivered with the sword outlined that the competition should “provide the Corps of Cadets with a challenging and rewarding regimental skills competition, which will enhance pro- fessional development and military excellence in selected soldier skills” (United States Military Academy, 2006, p. 1). In the early years of the competition only teams from West Point—one team representing each cadet company—participated in the event.2 Over time, however, West Point officials modified aspects of the competition and invited teams from other military academies, including Great Britain’s RMAS, the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), and teams from United States Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs. Today, West Point leaders use the competition “to test cadets’ ability to ‘move, 2A cadet company is a division of the student body or “Corps of Cadets.” A company is composed of roughly
shoot, and communicate,’ stressing teamwork among the classes as a fundamental and es- sential aspect of the competition” (United States Military Academy, 2006, p. 1).
The Sandhurst Competition is a one-day event in which nine-person teams, including a formal team leader, must navigate a nine-kilometer obstacle course packed with ten chal- lenges, such as diagnosing and repairing faulty communications equipment, crossing a river gap, climbing a ten-foot wall, and providing medical triage to battlefield casualties. A team receives a unique score for its performance on each of the ten challenges that accounts for how fast the team completed the challenge and its adherence to formal competition guide- lines throughout the challenge. In addition to the individual challenge scores, teams receive an overall score for how quickly they navigate the full nine-kilometer course to complete the competition. The winner of the Sandhurst Competition is the team that receives the highest sum total score across these separately-scored and differentially-weighted compo- nents.
Although the actual competition is a one-day event, teams formally train for the compe- tition over the course of approximately four months. Formal team leaders have discretion over the method, frequency, and intensity with which they schedule and hold team training sessions, but competition guidelines govern the broad temporal parameters of the training program. Specifically, teams are prohibited from beginning formal training (and, indeed, do not have access to necessary training sites and equipment) prior to an official start date and the publication of “Operational Orders.” Furthermore, teams’ access to certain required resources (e.g., the range, rifles, and ammunition for marksmanship practice) is regulated throughout the four-month training period.
Sandhurst Competition teams are composed of cadets who volunteer to represent their military academies and preparatory programs. Most academies send only one or two teams. As the hosting academy, however, West Point enters one team to represent each of the 32 cadet companies and one “Brigade” team, which represents all of West Point. The Brigade
team is, by design, an all-star team of West Point cadets assembled to challenge the teams representing Great Britain and Canada, who are perennial favorites to win the event. In total, therefore, West Point enters 33 teams in the competition. These 33 teams compete not only for the overall Sandhurst championship, but also for intra-institutional awards and recognition.
Formal competition guidelines regulate the makeup of Sandhurst Competition teams. Specifically, to participate in the competition, a team must be composed of no more than nine members, including the formal team leader. The team leader is a cadet who volunteers to fill the role and who has been selected by non-cadet West Point officials. Of the nine Sandhurst team members, there must be one cadet from each West Point class—one Plebe (freshman), one Yearling or Yuk (sophomore), one Cow (junior), and one Firstie (senior). There also must be at least one female cadet on the team. Although the competition is limited to only nine team members, teams typically train with more than nine cadets during the four-month training period. Training additional team members is necessary because physical injuries during training are an unfortunate but all-too-frequent reality. Having more than one female member and more than one member from each class is thus critical; an injury to a team’s lone female or Plebe would prevent the team from competing on game day.
For a variety of reasons the Sandhurst competition is an attractive setting in which to study the effects of team trait positive affect on project team development and effective- ness. Sandhurst teams are project teams—they are relatively short-lived groups of people brought together to work interdependently and accomplish a specific task in a specific time period before disbanding (Ericksen & Dyer, 2004). Because organizations are increasingly adopting such project team-based structures to accomplish a broad range of organizational tasks ranging from research and development to product troubleshooting (Keller, 2001), the findings of a study of Sandhurst teams can have real and meaningful implications for
contemporary organizational settings. Clearly most organizational settings, particularly for-profit settings, are not as structured or regulated as the Sandhurst Competition. The structure of the setting, however, while requiring that generalizations to traditional organia- tional settings must be made with care, creates a number of benefits for the internal validity of the research. First, because of the official rules that govern team training, the Sandhurst Competition provides an opportunity to study in parallel multiple teams from the begin- ning of team formation through task completion. Second, the tasks that Sandhurst teams are charged with completing are constant across teams; in most for-profit settings, it is rare to find a sizable number of teams working independently on the same set of tasks. And, third, the Sandhurst Competition provides a clean, objective measure of team performance that is equivalent across teams.