Assessment of Managerial Skills in a PSO: The Eufor Case and Its Capacity Building Role

The European Union (EU) launched a military operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2004 named "EUFOR - Operation Althea" to assist Bosnia by ensuring safe and secure environment and conducting capacity building and training tasks in support of the Armed Forces Bosnia and Herzegovina to facilitate their progress towards EU and Euro-Atlantic integration.

In the meantime, militaries directly and indirectly are suffering from spending cuts and efficiency and effectiveness have been core issues of defense forces. Eventually this emphasizes a better assessment of training of military personnel in peace operations. The current attention is focused on how to train prospective military personnel for asymmetric warfare. Developing management skills may help to better PO practices.  The aim of this paper is to assess the managerial skills of EUFOR peacekeepers from participant perspective and to emphasize the individual capacity building role of PSO experiences in removing the training deficiencies of peacekeepers. The research will also try to discuss wide-ranging impacts of asymmetric warfare on the officer profession, military training and education.

Ten different managerial skills (leading, decision making, stress management, problem solving, team working, motivation, and conflict management etc.) under personal, interpersonal and group level are studied in this research. The data (perspectives of participants of EUFOR) were collected from the interviews with five high  level military managers of EUFOR and also with the “Assessment of Managerial Skills Questionnaire” filled by 32 peacekeepers from nine different countries including; Austria, BiH, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Turkey. The collected data was analyzed by the content analysis method and it was found that there are training gaps in some areas, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model for training in PSO’s and the operational experience itself helps to fill these gaps.