Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past.

Abstract

This article analyzes the topic of leadership from an evolutionary perspective and proposes three conclusions that are not part of mainstream theory. First, leading and following are strategies that evolved for solving social coordination problems in ancestral environments, including in particular the problems of group movement, intragroup peacekeeping, and intergroup competition. Second, the relationship between leaders and followers is inherently ambivalent because of the potential for exploitation of followers by leaders. Third, modern organizational structures are sometimes inconsistent with aspects of our evolved leadership psychology, which might explain the alienation and frustration of many citizens and employees. The authors draw several implications of this evolutionary analysis for leadership theory, research, and practice.

What makes articles highly cited?

“…We list the most important of these schools given that we used them to estimate their impact on citations of quantitative articles. Relying on previous reviews (Bass & Bass, 2008;Gardner, Lowe, Moss, Mahoney, & Cogliser, 2010;House & Aditya, 1997;Lowe & Gardner, 2000;Van Seters & Field, 1990), Day and Antonakis (2012) classified leadership schools into the following parsimonious categories: (a) trait, focusing on stable and personal attributes (e.g., personality) of leaders (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002;Lord, De Vader, & Alliger, 1986); (b) behavioral, which studies behavioral styles of leaders, usually looking at social support (consideration) or task (initiating structure) orientation (Judge, Piccolo, & Ilies, 2004), or other behavioral aspects of leadership; (c) contextual, which models how context affects the leadership phenomenon (Liden & Antonakis, 2009;Osborn, Hunt, & Jauch, 2002;Porter & McLaughlin, 2006); (d) contingency, which seeks to model how situational demands affect the impact of behavioral styles on outcomes (Fiedler, 1967;House & Mitchell, 1974); (e) relational, which focuses on quality of relations between leaders and followers (Dansereau, Graen, & Haga, 1975;Graen & Uhl-bien, 1995); (f) information processing, which employs a cognitive perspective of leadership (Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984;Lord & Maher, 1991); (g) the "new" leadership, which focuses on visionary, values-centered, and charismatic aspects of leadership and related perspectives (Bass, 1985;House, 1977); (h) biological and evolutionary perspectives, which take a genetic, neuroscientific, "hard"-science, or evolutionary approach to leadership (Van Vugt, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2008;Waldman, Balthazard, & Peterson, 2011). They also defined the "skeptics" school, which treats leadership as a social construction (Eden & Leviatan, 1975;Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985), though they have suggested that this school is mostly subsumed in the information processing perspective.…”

Gods and Dictatorships: A Defence of Heroical Apatheism

“…One can draw attention to two distinct evolutionary features in human beings that are relevant to this connection. The first is that throughout history, human beings have instinctively been social animals (Van Vugt, Hogan and Kaiser 2008). This instinct has first created pack leaders and in accordance with our increasing intelligence and more complex culture, this instinct reasonably led first to chieftains and medicine men and then to kings and hypothetical gods.…”

The Evolution of Division of Labor

“…An open question is why individuals would not all attempt to perform the role associated with the highest fitness benefit, or in other words, why individuals would perform roles that put their genes at an evolutionary disadvantage for survival. Group selection pressures among human tribes have been proposed as one possible explanation for the evolution of leaders and followers [4]. In this paper, we explore whether group selection is sufficient to produce division of labor, where individual selection rewards different roles unequally.…”

“…For example, leadership is a common role found within multiple species, where the benefits of leadership are significantly greater than that of a follower. In human societies, leaders of organizations commonly earn many times more than the average worker [4]. An open question is why individuals would not all attempt to perform the role associated with the highest fitness benefit, or in other words, why individuals would perform roles that put their genes at an evolutionary disadvantage for survival.…”

“…Within nature, many organisms live in groups where individuals assume different roles and cooperate to survive [1][2][3][4]. For example, in honeybee colonies, among other roles, drones care for the brood, workers forage for pollen, and the queen focuses on reproduction [1].…”