[tt] NS: Follow me: The origins of leadership

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Follow me: The origins of leadership
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826601.900&print=true
11 June 2008
Mark van Vugt

WHAT makes a good leader? Do different political, economic and
social situations demand leaders with particular styles? How should
we judge who is right for the job? Why are we so often disappointed
with those in charge?

In the run-up to the US elections Americans will doubtless be asking
such questions. They are not alone. Leadership is an issue that
pervades almost every aspect of our lives, from the family and the
office to our local community, national politics and beyond. No
wonder the subject attracts so much attention.

Despite the seeming glut of information, however, one aspect has
been sorely missing - the historical perspective. Until recently,
very few people have considered the origins of leadership. Yet to
understand how our ancestors acquired the psychological biases upon
which leadership is based is to see the concept in a whole new
light. In particular, the evolutionary perspective highlights the
importance of those who follow and the reasons why leaders and
followers may not see eye to eye. It can also indicate what sort of
leader is best suited to take charge in a particular situation. It
can explain some of our seemingly arbitrary preferences - for tall
leaders, for example - and it even suggests why there is a bias
towards men as leaders.

In essence, leadership is a response to the need for collective
action. How do members of a group decide what to do and how and when
to do it? An obvious solution is for one individual to take the
initiative and provide guidance while the rest agree to follow. If
this strategy promotes survival, then psychological adaptations for
both leadership and "followership" are likely to evolve. In humans
these would have included specialised mental mechanisms for
planning, communication, group decision-making, competence
recognition, social learning and conflict management. Although such
traits are generally associated with higher reasoning, cognitive
pre-adaptations for leadership probably evolved long before modern
humans ever appeared on the scene.

The foraging patterns of many insects, the schooling of fish and the
flying patterns of birds all suggest that species lacking complex
cognitive capacities can nevertheless display leadership and
followership - perhaps using the simple rule "follow the one who
moves first". Our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, also use
leadership to coordinate group movement and to keep the peace or
wage war.

First among equals

The animal evidence supports the idea that adaptations for
leadership and followership tend to evolve in social species. In
humans, they were probably further shaped by our unique evolutionary
history. There were three distinct stages in human development where
the nature of leadership altered to reflect cultural and social
changes (American Psychologist, vol 63, p 182).

The first and by far the longest phase extended from the emergence
of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, until the end of
the last ice age about 13,000 years ago. Natural selection for
certain successful strategies of leadership and followership during
this long era is likely to have shaped the distinctly human
leadership psychology we still have to this day. Throughout this
time, our ancestors probably lived in semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer
bands of between 50 and 150 mostly related individuals. Their
lifestyle is widely thought to have resembled that of today's
hunter-gatherer societies such as the Kung San of the Kalahari
desert and the Amazonian Yanomamo. These groups are fundamentally
egalitarian, with no formal leader. Although there are "Big Men" -
the best hunters and warriors or wisest elders, for example - the
influence of each is limited to their areas of expertise and,
crucially, it is only granted with the approval of followers. This
suggests that collaboration among subordinates allowed early humans
to move beyond the dominance hierarchies found in other primates,
towards a much flatter prestige-based hierarchy with a more
democratic style of leadership.

With the development of agriculture some 13,000 years ago, groups
settled, populations grew rapidly and, for the first time in human
history, communities accumulated surplus resources. They needed
leaders to redistribute this surplus and to deal with increasing
conflict both within and between groups. The power of leaders grew
accordingly, and with it the potential to abuse this power. Leaders
could now siphon off resources and use them to create cultural
elites, while disgruntled followers were less free to move away from
exploitative rulers. The result of such changes was a more
formalised, authoritarian leadership style and the emergence of the
first chiefs and kings, as well as warlords bent on extracting
resources through force.

The industrial revolution, some 250 years ago, paved the way for the
final phase of leadership - the one to which academic discussions of
leadership, which tend to focus on business and politics, almost
exclusively refer. At the beginning of this era followers were
little more than slaves, but as citizens and employees acquired more
freedom to defect from overbearing leaders, the balance of power
shifted away from authoritarian leaders and back to something more
like the egalitarian approach of ancestral times.

So, what can evolution tell us about modern leadership? The
ancestral environment may have equipped us with innate preferences
for certain characteristics in our leaders. For a start, we want
them to be both competent and benevolent, because these sorts of
people will be better at acquiring resources and more willing to
share them. We also tend to choose leaders with certain physical
characteristics. Other theories of leadership have failed to account
for the importance of seemingly arbitrary attributes such as height,
age, weight and health, but these make sense from an evolutionary
perspective. For example, ancestral Big Men were probably quite
literally that: by dint of their imposing physique, tall people
would have been more effective peacekeepers and more intimidating
foes. Even today we have a bias towards taller leaders (Journal of
Applied Psychology, vol 89, p 428). In ancestral times elders were
likely to have acquired specialist knowledge, and in the modern
world older leaders are preferred in situations where knowledge is
crucial, such as in running public corporations (Leadership and
Governance from the Inside Out, edited by Robert Gandossy and
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Wiley, 2004). Followers may also have evolved a
preference for fit and healthy leaders in situations where strength
and stamina mattered. That could be why modern voters prefer
physically fit and energetic political candidates (Personality and
Social Psychology Review, vol 10, p 354).

More controversially, evolution might explain our bias towards male
leaders in most circumstances. When men and women work together, men
are quicker to claim leadership roles even when women are better
qualified (Psychological Bulletin, vol 130, p 711). Moreover, a
recent experiment by myself and Brian Spisak, also at the University
of Kent (to be published in Psychological Science later this year),
revealed that groups tend to look to men for leadership when faced
with a threat from another group, possibly because inter-group
conflict would have been resolved by force throughout most of human
history. However, we also found that in situations where there is
internal conflict in a group, women are the preferred and most
effective leaders. This is confirmed by a recent mock election study
which found that people tended to vote for a male president when
their country was at war, but a female during peacetime (Evolution
and Human Behavior, vol 28, p 18). A history of inter-group conflict
might have predisposed men to adopt a hierarchical leadership style,
while a need for social unity might have equipped women with a more
egalitarian, personalised and communal style. If the predominance of
male leaders in many sectors of modern life is a vestige of our
past, it could be a costly one in an interconnected world in which
the emphasis is on interpersonal skills and network-building.

This raises another important aspect of leadership that is often
overlooked - that what constitutes good leadership varies according
to the situation. The different leadership styles adopted by various
organisations, nations and cultures can be understood in part by
considering the specific challenges posed by their particular
physical and social environment. In the Netherlands and Australia,
for example, where harsh natural conditions force the authorities to
collaborate closely with citizens, there is a strong egalitarian
ethos. In emergencies such as wars or natural disasters, followers
readily defer to the decisions of a single autocratic individual.
Indeed, US voters tend to choose hawkish presidents when threatened
by war.

All this suggests that leadership and followership are flexible
strategies shaped by the interplay between ancient evolutionary
pressures and modern environmental and cultural demands. However,
there are major differences between modern leadership roles and the
kind of leadership for which our psychology is adapted, and this
mismatch can be problematic. For a start, our hunter-gatherer
ancestors would have deferred to different leaders depending on the
nature of the problem at hand. Yet today a single individual is
often responsible for managing all aspects of an enterprise. Few
leaders have the range of skills required, which may account for the
high failure rate of senior managers - in corporate America it runs
at 50 per cent (Review of General Psychology, vol 9, p 169). Surveys
routinely show that between 60 and 70 per cent of employees find the
most stressful part of their job is dealing with their immediate
boss. This may be partly because ancestral leaders only acquired
power with the approval of followers, whereas in modern
organisations leaders are usually appointed by and accountable to
their superiors, while subordinates are rarely allowed to sanction
their bosses. What's more, our psychology equips us to thrive in
smallish groups of closely related individuals, which may explain
why many people feel indifferent to large organisations and their
leaders. Finally, in ancestral societies there would have been
minimal differences in status between leaders and followers. In the
US, average salaries for CEOs are 179 times those of their workers.

The upside is that insights from evolution also suggest more
effective leadership strategies. In recent years there has been
increasing interest in the idea of shared or distributed leadership.
Some organisations are finding that executives are more likely to
succeed if subordinates are included in the selection process.
Meanwhile, effective businesses - including Toyota and Virgin - are
designing and structuring their organisations to more closely
resemble hunter-gatherer bands. For instance, they delegate
decision-making to managers far down the chain of command, creating
functional groups of between 50 and 150 members.

By emphasising interdependence and shared interests, values and
goals, a truly transformational leader can change followers from
self-interested individuals to committed collectivists.
Unfortunately, such people are thin on the ground. Instead, we are
often required to defer to leaders whose remit and behaviour is
inconsistent with our evolved expectations of leadership. That can
be alienating, but at least followers can sometimes do something
about it. That is exactly what millions of US citizens will be doing
when they exercise their power to vote for a new president.

Human Evolution - Follow the incredible story in our comprehensive
special report.

Why be a follower?

Considering leadership from the evolutionary perspective throws a
spotlight on followers. The psychology of followership is usually
neglected, but it is more interesting than that of leadership. Most
of us are destined to be followers, yet we are only starting to
understand what makes a good follower and how they influence
leaders. A key puzzle is what motivates followers. Why would
individuals agree to subordinate themselves when this puts them at a
disadvantage compared with leaders in terms of power, status and
resources?

The decision to follow may simply be a rational one: if the costs of
competing for higher status outweigh the benefits, then following
frees up time and energy that can be used more effectively
elsewhere. Besides, followers can improve their position relative to
leaders by engaging in collective action. Another idea is that
complying with and observing leaders may allow followers to prepare
themselves for future leadership. Finally, the disadvantages of
following are partly offset by the benefits of belonging to a
well-led group. So natural selection at the group level might
account for leadership.

The relationship between followers and leaders is inherently
ambivalent because there is always a risk that leaders will try to
coerce or exploit their followers, and that followers will plot to
depose their leaders. This tension probably created an evolutionary
arms race in terms of the strategies used to gain control.
Nevertheless, research shows that people readily adopt
leadership/followership behaviour in circumstances that mirror
adaptive problems, such as when there are internal group conflicts
or external threats (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
vol 76, p 587).

However, there are situations in which leadership is not necessary,
and is even resented by followers. Experiments show that unnecessary
leadership can actually undermine team performance (Group Dynamics,
vol 2, p 168). The lesson for businesses and politicians here is
that when faced with relatively simple or routine coordination
problems, people usually perform better if left alone.

Related Articles

Evolution: survival of the selfless
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626281.500
03 November 2007
How can man improve man?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225780.022
18 October 2006
Born to trade
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324655.500
18 September 2004

Weblinks

American Psychologist paper by van Vugt, Hogan and Kaiser
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.3.182
Mark van Vugt's homepage
http://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/department/people/van-vugtm/