Empowering the backbone of the Philippine Airforce: Zooming in on non-commissioned officers

• Main Authors: Bernal, Bianca Louise F., Buenconsejo, Janica G., Santos, Finella Eunice H., Te, Jennifer Anne Bernice R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2014
• Subjects: Armed Forces; Armed Forces > Non-commissioned officers; Armed Forces > Officers
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/5938
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Armed Forces of the Philippines have developed empowerment programs that aims to maximize Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) leadership potential. This qualitative study explored the experiences of four NCOs who have been in service for more than 20 years and are aware and have experienced NCO programs provided by the military organization through in-depth interviews. Guided by a social constructionism paradigm, the intent is to consider the participants' actions, culture, and overall experience to be the NCOs way of engaging the environment they are in. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) yielded two frameworks that can describe the NCO Empowerment process, and its effects on the military organization: (1) The essence of NCO Empowerment is a conjugation of Trust, Appreciation, Respect, and (2) Maintaining and Enforcing standards through continuous training is a product of empowerment. The results also showed situations that lessen empowerment, where NCOs mostly feel less empowered when they are not given responsibilities to do for the military unit. This study shows that by giving the NCO a purpose, they are motivated to do work that is beyond what is expected of them and they develop a positive self-perception (1), and this continues on as they train and teach their own NCO subordinates (2).