Is Just Culture Compatible With Irish Defence Forces Leadership Doctrine?

Abstract

This paper aims to answer the primary research question: Is just culture compatible with Defence Forces Leadership Doctrine (DFLD)? Current DFLD provides an organisational framework intended to embed the cultural values, attributes, skills, and actions that contribute to leadership development, throughout all Defence Forces (DF) services. Unique within DFLD, the Irish Air Corps (IAC) advocate the practice of ‘just culture’ which centres around principles designed to create an environment of trust and accountability. Subsequently, these contribute to organisational learning and improvement as a consequence of addressing safety related systems failures while adopting a culpability mindset. If DF strategic leadership intend to advocate and foster cultural change throughout the organisation there must first be an acknowledgement that change takes time. The DF faces two challenges in introducing cultural change, firstly identifying organisational barriers to change, secondly how to overcome them.

This paper argues that if the DF seeks to foster a culture that sets the conditions for honest disclosure it must embrace collective learning as a consequence of mistakes. Significantly,  research revealed that there is a desire among organisational leadership to address this cultural void through the introduction of a parallel reporting system which is voluntary, nonpunitive and protected throughout the DF. Essentially, the adoption of just culture can only be validated if there is organisational buy in which is dependent on a cycle of trust and its advocacy by leadership emanating from within leadership doctrine.