serve as active reserve officers, career officers and career NCOs are fulltime professional officers. Prior to becoming a career officer or career NCO, the candidates completed at least one and a half years of training for militia officers or NCOs and were obliged to work temporarily as officers or NCO in the Swiss Armed Forces for one year, on average, to get practical experiences and a realistic insight into the actual job. The career personnel serve important functions such as educators and instructors, or preferably as coaches of the militia cadre. They are responsible for the molding of a leadership culture as well as the implementation of military guidelines.
The Swiss Army is a “training army,” in which the professional officers and NCOs do not primarily have to be part of military operations and foreign assignments. However, the Swiss Armed Forces spends the majority of its time training for operational readiness and for educating soldiers, as part of their mandatory military service. Correspondingly, values and virtues are the basis of military education. Military education aims at influencing the values and the behavior of soldiers purposefully and sustainably (Annen et al., 2004). The Swiss Armed Forces with their militia system of a compulsory military service are regarded as a mirror of the society as a whole (Haltiner, 1996). Around 95% of Swiss military armed troops are conscripts, who serve as citizens in uniform (Szvircsev Tresch, 2011). They incorporate likewise the values and virtues of the Swiss society. The Swiss Armed Forces are thus obliged to present the objectives and the content of military education to both their military personnel as well as to the civilian society as a whole, in a transparent manner. That is why the values and virtues that characterize military education must be understood (Annen et al., 2004). Clarity about the conveyed values and virtues is needed, as they define the content of military education. For the military leader this means that it is required to understand the values, to live them as a role model, and to eventually embody them. In particular, the Swiss Report on Military Ethics published on September 1, 2010 (Swiss Armed Forces, 2010) stated that the training and educational culture of the Swiss Armed Forces must be explicitly defined according to values and virtues. Therefore, it was considered as indispensable to consciously deal with the soldiers’ view and perception of values and virtues. The military education shall not convey a “counter world” to civil society (Eggimann & Annen, 2014). The Swiss Military Ethics Report is thus an up-to-date document, which refers to the importance of values and virtues in the Swiss Armed Forces and emphasizes the need for relevant scientific studies. However, currently there are no known military psychological studies, which have researched the values and virtues in the Swiss Armed Forces in a systematic and comprehensive manner.
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1.2 In search of military core values and virtues in the Swiss Armed Forces
Matthews (2012, p. 214) stressed the need for a military organization to understand cultural significance as it applies to values and virtues, stating: “Cultural considerations are of paramount importance in twenty-first-century warfare.” Furthermore, Britt, Adler, and Castro (2006) referred to the general requirement to address the question whether there are consistent values and virtues conveyed by the military organization. This perspective makes it a mandate to understand the core values and core virtues of an organization. Core values are principles that an organization views as being of central importance and reflect what the company values, setting the vision and goal of an organization (Duh, Belak, & Milfelner, 2010). Likewise, core virtues are the most important positive characteristics considered by an organization. Peterson and Seligman (2004) defined core virtues as “an abstract ideal, encompassing a number of other, more specific virtues that reliably converge to the recognizable higher-order category” (p. 35). Accordingly, core values and core virtues refer to categories of values and virtues which include expressions of thematically similar values and virtues grouped together4. Smolicz (1981) supposed that core values and virtues are forming fundamental components of a group’s culture and have an identifying function with the group and its membership. Overall, core values and core virtues are the stated values and virtues, prioritized by a cultural group of persons, by a nation or by an organization5. They help define the culture of the organization, thus giving meaning to all its members (Pathak et al., 2016).
Britt et al. (2006) stated that it is essential to define a classification of values and virtues within the military organization. Such a classification is defined as a descriptive selection of one or many core values and virtues, indicating the most preferred ones as they apply to an organization (Albert, 1956). As Albert (1956) outlined, a corporate classification of core values and virtues within a military ←33 | 34→organization is conceived as a representation of the cultural organizational consensus, envisaged as a point of reference for the description and reflection of individual differences in values and virtues.
So far, there has not been a valid classification of core values and virtues reflecting the culture of the Swiss Armed Forces. Each military leader gets the freedom to prioritize his or her own personal values and virtues, independent of a binding corporate classification of core values and virtues. However, the Swiss Report on Military Ethics (Swiss Armed Forces, 2010) makes it an important priority to devote scientific effort to further assess the values and virtues of the Swiss Armed Forces. Such a commitment is in support in defining which values and virtues are to be fostered across the Swiss Armed Forces and conveyed to the Swiss soldiers as part of the military education. The benefit results from providing a common corporate understanding of values and virtues within the Swiss Armed Forces (Annen, 2017). Furthermore, a valid classification allows for a transparent communication within the framework of military education and provides the opportunity to prove the impact of military education and value-based leadership. Specifically, it needs detailed assessment to understand which core values and virtues, e.g., Mutual Respect or Fortitude, are being propagated in order to evaluate the efforts of military education. Clarity on value and virtues provides the condition for military leaders to apply a discipline of self-reflection and interactive dialogue (Eggimann & Annen, 2014).
In spite of a high regard for the meaning of values and virtues by the military organization, the empirical approach in research has been falling short (Schumm, Gade, & Bell, 2003). However, outside of the military domain, there has been an increasing interest in studies identifying and structuring taxonomies of universal6 values and virtues. Specifically, Aavik and Allik (2002) gave preference to the psycholexical approach to develop a comprehensive and culture-sensitive list of universal values. De Raad and Van Oudenhoven (2011) initiated the same approach in classifying and structuring virtues followed by a series of corresponding research. The question of how many universal core values and core virtues7 can be distinguished has been investigated through a psycholexical and factor analytic analysis in a variety of different cultures (e.g., Aavik & Allik, 2002; De Raad & Van Oudenhoven, 2008, 2011; Morales-Vives, De Raad, & Vigil-Colet, 2012, 2014; Renner, 2003b).
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With this theoretical perspective in mind, the thesis represented an initial comprehensive effort to apply the psycholexical approach in assessing the structure of values and virtues in a military organization. As mentioned previously, this research implied the assumption that the military culture differs from the civilian environment. Accordingly, it was of significant interest to capture the uniqueness of the military value and virtue culture of the Swiss Armed Forces. The psycholexical method was described as sensitive to culture-related differences (De Raad & Van Oudenhoven, 2008). Worth mentioning, that in the Swiss Armed Forces there is still no comprehensive description and classification which reflect the cultural-specific aspects of the military organization and the views of the different military subgroups (e.g., including military militia and military professionals). Moreover, there are numerous value- and virtue-descriptive expressions such as responsibility, loyalty, security, and freedom used in the official and inofficial Swiss military documentation (Baumann, 2007), which need further structuring
