Navy Leadership Competence Education Using Moral Dilemma

Abstract

Republic of Korea(ROK)'s naval leadership education has long been conducted based on a knowledge-oriented approach. From January 1, 2006, the ROK Naval Leadership Center(NLC) launched to attempt to train leaders to make innovative changes in the Navy. The NLC attempts to adopt a number of desirable leadership theories, practices and examples for naval commanders in line with their naval characteristics. For that purpose, the NLC has been conducting several pilot studies to develop more advanced and field-oriented working-level leadership skills and educational contents reflecting ROK naval values and battle cases. The NLC also attempts to rebuild a value-based leadership education system linked to the core values of the ROK navy: honor, sacrifice and courage. The researchers have made some pioneering attempts through value-based leadership : First, they would like to rediscover the leadership and spirit of Admiral Yi Sun-shin for the construction of the honorable navy. Second, we try to establish a leadership education system optimized for the Navy in the 21st century based on the proud history and identity of ROK Navy. Third, the researchers intend to establish a academic theory and logic system to support the value-based leadership education model which is supposed to motivate the officers to internalize the naval values and leadership visions. Finally, we attempted to develop contents of leadership education based on effectiveness of combining problem-based learning and action learning with naval history and actual cases. Nevertheless, the Korean navy's leadership education still fails to break away from a fact-oriented, behavior-oriented approach. This study, therefore, presents an alternative methodology for the transition to a value-oriented approach. The value-oriented approach aims to use some hypothetical moral dilemmas requiring the learners to choose the pros and cons by themselves, and to harmoniously organize the moral reasoning directed toward value hierarchy. Particularly, the Moral Competence Test(MCT) developed by a German researcher G. Lind was employed as the core teaching method. The MCT showed several advantages of implementing instructions and evaluations without any gaps and it enhanced the student officers leadership effectiveness based on moral judgment. Follow-up studies should be conducted to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the value-based leadership education.