LEADER COMPLEXITY IN PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL CRISES - CONCURRENT AND RETROSPECTIVE INFORMATION-PROCESSING

Integrative complexity scoring can be applied to any connected verbal material and has been used to assess information-processing and decisi on-making under stress, Here, the technique was applied to the writing s of Lt.-Gen. Burns, a senior Canadian officer of World War II and com mander of UN peacekeeping forces afterward. During the war, Bums exper ienced three major crises, one arising out of a personal indiscretion and the others from professional shortcomings. As in previous studies, the personal event was associated with an increase in complexity; as in other research, complexity decreased in a time of professional crit icism and failure, increased during professional success, and increase d yet again when final failure occurred and he was relieved from stres s (and of his command). For the first time, the complexity of material written concurrently with events was compared with that of a retrospe ctive account written some 15 years later (Burns's memoirs). The latte r was consistently higher in complexity but followed the same general trends of increase and decrease with events. Long-term memories appear to replicate complexity changes in response to changing conditions bu t evidence more psychological investment in how one thinks about the e xperience.