The Royal Navy requires a well trained and highly motivated workforce to perform specialised and demanding tasks efficiently and effectively. Its continued success depends on sound financial provision and a supply of suitable personnel willing to serve. There are severe penalties from over or under estimating the number and cost of the people needed, so achieving the right balance is a matter of risk management. Study of the Royal Navy's history shows the problem of controlling the number of and expenditure on its personnel is not new, but the decision by the author in April 1997 to capture the location and payment made to each Naval Service person every month has enabled more light to be thrown on this complex issue. As a result of this work, a reliable, coherent and comprehensive data library was built and is still being maintained. New techniques were devised to track the movements and payments made to individual Naval Service people as they pass through the manning system. This dataset was used to establish the future cost and deployment patterns for Naval personnel in order to protect the Service by ensuring sufficient funds would be available to pay its planned strength. To achieve this, detailed forecasts were constructed so all the available trained strength was distributed to the individual budgets based on their historical allocation. This approach allowed visibility of the movement of manpower and its cost as the system responded to fluctuations in demand. Budget managers actively sought this information as it exposed sudden changes in manning levels and costs caused by action elsewhere. To meet this need, each budgetary area is now provided with its own individual planned demand for Naval manpower, its forecast of strength and its cost for the next four years. In this increasingly difficult financial situation, the political and economic signs indicate that the need for this type of work will grow as Service planners will be called upon to show their equipment programmes and personnel plans are affordable. As future governments struggle to meet demands for funding, the Service will have to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of any new manning initiative which, for it to be successful, will have to be supported by empirical evidence and offer an analytical framework that will demonstrate its value both before and after implementation.

The history of women in Britain's armed forces is dominated by wartime participation and, latterly, explanations of wider employment of servicewomen in the 1990s. Women's service is mainly attributed to lessening the need for men. Reasons suggested for 1990s' developments have included social factors, technology, servicewomen's career aspirations and policy-makers' attitudes. However, army issues overshadow accounts that emerge from the other Services. When regular service was introduced, women were excluded from seagoing, flying and weapons' training. Terms of service on marriage and pregnancy ensured careers were long-term opportunities only for childless women. This thesis accounts for how the reputedly egalitarian Royal Air Force (RAF) integrated its servicewomen, expanding their employment into armed guard duties and flying 'non-combat' aircraft, while asserting that women's exclusion from combat was upheld. This contrasted with the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS). As a separate, shore- based organisation, it illustrated the conservative approach taken by the naval authorities. Yet it was the Royal Navy (RN) that opened main combat roles to women first. This thesis argues that the Admiralty reluctantly established a peacetime WRNS in response to Air Ministry and War Office policy. It restricted women's employment until failure to adjust to social change led to a personnel crisis in the late 1980s. Unable to follow the RAF's piecemeal widening of women's roles, seagoing in warships was approved in 1990, overturning women's exclusion from main combat roles. RAF combat jet flying followed as a consequence. However, for the vast majority of airwomen, the 1982 decision to introduce weapons' training made them as combatant as male counterparts. Exclusion from land warfare continued; the RN and the RAF followed the army's lead. The armed forces' right to be different from civilian maternity policy succumbed to legal challenge rather than commitment to modernising terms of employment.

The aim of this research is to investigate the dilemmas of upward social mobility within the Royal Navy. Thirty percent of Royal Navy officers are recruited from the subordinate group known as ratings. There are considerable differences in cultural and behavioural expectations between the officer and rating groups. Officership in the Royal Navy is a high status profession which is aligned with upper middle class outlooks, as compared with the working class orientation of ratings. The research is a field analysis of the Navy from a sociological perspective. It investigates officers who served during the period from 1934 to 2012. The research draws on the work a number of theorists particularly Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of hysteresis and habitus clivé. It investigates the promotion process; how officers negotiate the transition from membership of a subordinate group to that of a superordinate group, and what strategies former ratings utilise to gain promotion and perform the role of naval officer. The thesis provides a close investigation of the officer world; comparison is made between the sub fields of the rating mess decks and the officer’s wardroom taking into consideration the difference in expectations of material culture and corporeal embodiments in the two groups. In addition, the implications of promotion on the officer’s family and his relationship with extended family is taken into to account, as promotion can impact on all family members. The research findings indicate that majority of the promoted men experienced ontological insecurity, they felt a disconnection between their innate sense of self and what they should be as an officer. As they transitioned from the rating to officer corps they enter a new operational field which is misaligned with their habitus, thus resulting in hysteresis. The individual finds themselves leading a duality of existences – a divided self or what Bourdieu calls habitus clivé. The conclusions indicate that habitus is such a strong influence on our understanding of self it overrides all other influences such as training and economic capital.

Leadership studies have traditionally considered leader characteristics to account for leadership outcomes such as leader emergence or team performance. This heroic narrative has always had its opponents but recently a post-heroic approach is becoming more prominent. Post-heroic approaches contest the assertion that leadership outcomes are mainly the product of leader traits. My research begins with a particular leader trait, the ability to interact, and bridges the two approaches by investigating the process from leader competence to leadership outcomes. The research uses a sequential exploratory design incorporating mixed methods. Three projects were conducted in Royal Navy (RN) warships. A qualitative project developed a leader-follower interaction model. The model suggests that leadership is granted by followers after a long-term series of mundane encounters. These encounters allow followers to build a group consensus of leader prestige. Prestige inuences follower behaviour such as engagement, disengagement and a covert form of resistance called levelling. A second project mapped the advice and participation networks on RN vessels and determined the prestige of team and sub-team leaders. Regression techniques allowed me to verify empirically the signicant relationship between prestige scores and team performance for ships conducting Sea Training. A nal project conducted on a warship in the South Atlantic verified a similar relationship between advice network prestige and intra-team communication. Finally I used the findings of the two empirical projects, based on sub-team or dyadic relationships, to model the effects of prestige at the group level, using computer simulation. I discovered that prestige that is dispersed throughout a group generates more effective teams, in terms of communication, than other conditions. This challenges the traditional top-down view of leadership communication. The resulting leader-follower interaction model describes a series of mundane and contested encounters through which prestige is given to dispersed leaders within a group. The theoretical impact of my research is to develop trait-process approaches to leadership and to describe leader-follower interaction as a post-heroic process. In doing so, I synthesise engagement theory with antropological approaches, including resistance to leadership. Practically, my projects validate the RN's compentency method of selecting leaders but points out that prestigious leaders alone cannot maximise team performance.

Following a series of imposed redundancies in the Royal Navy (RN) there was a need to understand the career desires of remaining personnel and how these interact with important organisational behaviours and turnover. Taking a social psychology perspective, this thesis addresses criticisms over the high use of non-working populations in research and provides the first empirical evidence for the utility, applicability and relevance of specific psychological theories to the RN. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between career anchors and psychological contract violation, organisational commitment and turnover. Evidence was found for the applicability and potential generalisability of civilian-based research to the RN. RN career anchor preferences were similar to some non-military organisations, and these preferences differentially influenced the variables explored. Chapter 3 presents an intervention developed to support newly appointed Career Managers to increase awareness of human resource issues, representing the first exploration of induction on later attitudes of ‘experienced newcomers’ in the RN. The induction did not influence attitudes; although time did, indicating the importance of role clarity. Chapter 4 provides a critical literature review of work-family conflict (WFC) and its influence on turnover intentions of military personnel and effects on military spouses. The expected negative relationship between WFC and turnover was found, although not consistently; types of satisfaction mediated this relationship, and WFC was linked to stress. Chapter 5 provides new empirical understanding of the interactions between ethos, organisational identity, and engagement on career motivation, perceived future opportunities and intentions to stay. Differences in these constructs were also explored between discrete RN groupings. The relationship between identity and ethos, and engagement, identity and ethos were explored to advance theoretical understanding of these constructs, finishing with an extension to Chapter 2 through revisiting career anchors. In conclusion, this thesis provides new contextual insights, interactions and relationships for academic knowledge, psychological theory and addresses a practical organisational issue within a highly regarded and inaccessible organisation. The outcomes provide the first empirical evidence of career-related behaviours within the RN, and more generally indicate the applicability of civilian based psychological theories to a military population, in particular, career anchors, ethos and focus on opportunities and their importance for people strategy decisions supporting evidence-based decision making within the workplace.