Commentary on the Article by Hoermann and Goerke: Do Pilots Need Social Competence?

Abstract

This article provides a valuable overview of personality characteristics that might be important for crew members in multipilot operations, including social competence. Social competence involves reading, understanding, and influencing social interactions, and it can be measured by self-report, interviews, or observations. It represents a different set of personal characteristics relative to cognitive abilities and personality traits. The study examines whether self-report measures of social competence can be used as a low-cost alternative to assessment centers in pilot selection or as a preselection tool for more expensive methods at a later stage. The study was based on a sample of applicants for ab initio pilot training at Lufthansa, where the two measures of social competence were administered but not used in the selection process. Social interaction is fundamental both in private life and at work. There are many partly overlapping constructs that reflect aspects of this phenomenon, including social IQ, emotional IQ, social self-efficacy, political skills, social skills, and social competence. The term social effectiveness has been suggested as a higher order label for all of these constructs, but exactly how they are related and how they should be measured is not clear (Ferris, Perrewé, & Douglas, 2002). There is some evidence suggesting that social effectiveness is indeed important for work performance in general (Ferris et al., 2002), but it has so far not been examined systematically in relation to pilot selection. Research on pilot selection methods, in the main, has focused on developing and validating cognitive ability tests (see, e.g., Carretta & Ree, 2003; Hunter & Burke, 1995). However, since the beginning of aviation, other personal characteristics have been emphasized as important, and many attempts have been made to define and measure these qualities. Dockeray and Isaacs (1921, p. 147) wrote that “quiet methodological men were among the best flyers” based on participant observation. The Danish psychologist Alfred Lehmann suggested a few years later that emotional stability could be measured by firing a gun and measuring physiological reactions to this unexpected event (Martinussen & Hunter, 2010). In addition, a large number of personality tests have been tried out on U.S. military pilots (for an overview see Dolgin & Gibb, 1988), including measures developed more for clinical use than for personnel selection. Kragh (1960) developed the Defense Mechanism Test, which is a projective test assumed to measure deeper personality