Future Officers’ Military Management Competence Development in Higher Military Educational Institutions

Abstract

The article reveals the specific pedagogical conditions essential for developing the management competence of future officers during their studies at higher military educational institutions in Ukraine. The research has clarified the optimal pedagogical essence, identified the required components of management competence for future officers, and determined its criteria, levels, and indicators. The management competence of future officers has been defined as an individual, integral, relatively stable, dynamically changing characteristic of the personality of cadets, which is the result of their continuous professional and personal development, manifested in the independent and responsible solution of the tasks of ensuring optimal relations between servicemen, their associations, groups, which carry out joint activities following the commanders’ orders, service duties and norms of military routine and combat activity. The structure of the management competence of future officers reflects the unity of its critical components: value-motivational, cognitive-communicative, practical-activity, and personal-reflective. A criterion-assessment apparatus has been developed and substantiated, which allows for the clear determination of the levels (high, sufficient, satisfactory, low) of managerial competence according to axiomatic, informational, communicative, and praxeoactivity criteria, with specifically identified indicators. The authors argue that with the purpose to enhance the quality of professional training of cadets in higher military educational institutions, the necessary pedagogical conditions for the development of management competence of future officers have to be designed and theoretically substantiated, such as: enrichment of the educational process in higher military educational institutions with managerial and dialogical interaction of teachers and cadets; problematic nature of cadet training in the context of modeling military management activities; ensuring real powers and responsibilities of cadets during training practice as a unit commander (by specialty); providing pedagogical support while developing professional and management qualities of future officers. To demonstrate that the pedagogical conditions for developing the managerial competence of future officers are effective, an experimental study was conducted. Comparative data on the stages of the pedagogical experiment (declarative and formative) indicate positive dynamics regarding the defined levels of formation of all components of management competence of future officers. The reliability of the obtained results was verified by methods of mathematical statistics.