Commentary on the Article by Turner: Cultural Complexity in Pilot Selection

Turner recounts a process of self-reflection and organizational review in which a flight training organization with a contract to educate pilots from the People’s Republic of China adapted and revised both its selection and its training and development strategies to account for differences in culture and practice. Quite rightly, the role of culture is central to this discussion, as it impacts both the selection of candidates for training and the response to training once candidates are selected. The difficulty for the flight training organization involved educating prospective pilots who might not necessarily possess the aptitude, but whose family has invested significant resources in acquiring a position in the training program. Inevitably, this imposed significant demands on both the flight training organization and the candidates to perform at the requisite standard necessary for success. Once selected into the training program, it became difficult to identify and then exclude candidates from training, to the point where significant resources were being invested before poorly performing candidates were identified and finally excluded from further training. The identification of poorly performing trainees was exacerbated by self-imposed protective measures among the candidates that included the support of colleagues, which, in some cases, might have masked poor performance. The development of a strong in-group identity was possibly accentuated by the highly collectivist nature of the Chinese culture, together with the location of the training program outside China and schooled by non-Chinese educators. As part of a review process, members of the flight training organization noted the importance of managing the initial selection process, because the cultural characteristics that would emerge postselection would be very difficult to manage. Culture, in and of itself, is a ubiquitous construct, but one that is all too often overlooked in the development and assessment of training initiatives. Capitalizing on the characteristics of underlying culture can improve performance in some contexts, and degrade performance in others (Helmreich & Merritt, 2001). Importantly, however, culture, whether it is at the organizational or national level, has a pervasive effect and this is recognized and accepted by Turner. To obviate the requirement to potentially exclude trainees following their arrival in Canada, the flight training organization developed an in-country process where prospective applicants would complete part of the knowledge-based syllabus in-country (China) and, on the basis of