Reference Group Behavior and Social Integration: An Explorative Study

and if the officer-instructor makes all his decisions at choice points in terms of this role, he will not be called to task for having erred. Consider, on the other hand, the officerinstructor who thinks of himself as a teacher first and an officer second. He is stripped of a general frame of reference for decision making. Unlike his colleagues, he is very troubled that rank rather than teaching experience too often determines position in his school. He is troubled too that the recognition given an instructor may depend more on the insignia on his collar than on his knowledge of the subject And so on. He is troubled because he is making decisions in terms of the teacher role when the dominant expectations and the appropriate decisions in the situation, whether he likes it or not, are made in terms of the officer role. The officer-instructor at Air University who chooses as his major role the instructor rather than the officer role is more likely to be involved in conflict because his major role is not also the legitimate role. It is noteworthy that it is the officer-instructor trained in a civilian specialty, say lawyer, and required to teach this civilian subject matter who is in more conflict than the officer-instructor trained in a military specialty teaching military subject matter. And it is the officer-instructor with many years service as officer, that is at least well committed to the military role, who is in less conflict at Air University than the officer-instructor with less service as officer. There has been a tendency to place emphasis in the study of role effectiveness on the relative congruence of personality needs and role expectations. This, it seems to us, is a necessary condition but by no means a sufficient one. It is also necessary that the expectations that are engaged by the needs be the more legitimate ones within the total setting. We would hold that in a role conflict situation the sufficient conditions for role effectiveness, technical skill aside, are twofold: the congruence of personality needs and role expectations and the choice of a major role that is the more legitimate one. Further clarification of the effective handling of role conflict might well be pushed forward within the three concepts involved in these conditions: the choice of major role, the congruence of needs and expectations, and the legitimacy of expectations within the situation.