Cultivation of Instantaneous Leaders: A Phenomenological Study of Military Leaders

December 3, 2025

Cultivation of Instantaneous Leaders: A Phenomenological Study of Military Leaders’ Cultural Acceptance in Civilian Organizations

Timothy Michael White | 2023

Abstract

This study contributed to the betterment of the organizational leadership development process by examining the military leader transitionary process and the experiences of separated military leaders within their follow-on civilian positions. The results shed light on the critical elements of successful integration practices. These realizations can alleviate veterans’ challenges and offer civilian organizations a leadership development alternative that can decrease the cost of leadership recapitalization, increase the quality of their organizational workforce, and realize a more robust, effective, and efficient organizational structure. This phenomenological examination revealed and established veteran leaders’ experiences in their transition. The purposefully selected sample included eight retired military leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense, each with 20 years or more of military experience, who completed comprehensive interview. The findings generated a satisfactory saturation level through the use of in vivo, concept, and comparative coding, resulting in 20 codes arranged into the six themes of culture challenge, culturally disenfranchised, culturally stable, develop cohesive organization, develop cross-cultural education, and learned understanding. The responses indicated that even though cultural acceptance exists, a greater bias exists at the civilian organization’s supervisor, peer, subordinate, and overall cultural levels. Further, the responses indicated a bias by the veterans toward civilian organizations, which exacerbated the veterans’ civilian organizational disenfranchisement. The responses also indicated that the cultural acceptance occurred due to a learned understanding of the differing cultures and that civilian organizations could benefit from adopting a few military traditions to generate veteran understanding and organizational esprit de corps. This study represents a significant contribution to the body of knowledge by addressing and partially filling a research gap, providing civilian organizations with the information to address glaring inadequacies in their cultural biases toward veteran leaders in order to render solutions to the challenge. In doing so, a civilian organization could provide a vast supply of readily trained and operationally tested leaders to augment its leadership departments and prepare for future organizational changes.

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