From genes to minds to cultures: Evolutionary approaches to leadership

Evolutionary perspectives are part of any comprehensive explanation of leadership and, more generally, hierarchy formation in groups. This editorial describes contributions to a special issue on the theme of “The evolution and biology of leadership: A new synthesis”, and we reach four main conclusions. First, leadership has been a powerful force in the biological and cultural evolution of human sociality. Humans have evolved a range of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms (adaptations) that facilitate leader-follower relations, including safeguards against overly dominant leaders. Second, how these adaptations interact with local ecological and cultural contexts produces cultural variation in leadership preferences, and in the structure of human organizations more broadly. Third, an evolutionary perspective creates consilience between the social and natural sciences, by integrating leadership theory from diverse fields such as biology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, and political science. Fourth, evolutionary approaches – and specifically the collection of articles in this theme issue – produce and test novel hypotheses, such as regards (i) the critical role of leadership in cooperation, (ii) the importance of contextual factors in leader emergence and effectiveness, (iii) interactions between genetic and cultural influences on leadership, and (iv) obstacles and opportunities for women leaders.     

Bringing the cognitive revolution forward: What can team cognition contribute to our understanding of leadership?

Cognition is a central element of organizational behavior and leaders are seen as key shapers of organizational cognition. Leaders’ influence over organizations often occurs through their influence on the collectives or teams they are leading. Hence, leaders influence organizational outcomes by modeling team cognition. Despite the importance of this relationship for organizational outcomes, there is little integration currently between the leadership and team cognition literatures. To address this gap, we conduct an integrative review. First, we develop a model for leader and team influence based on organizational emergence and leadership complexity theories. Our model makes a distinction between the source of influence over cognition (leader → team, team → leader, reciprocal) and form of cognition emergence (variance reduction, variance enhancement); constraints that shape cognitions that vary in levels (within and between-level, contextual) and focus (individual, interindividual, collective); and leader behaviors (administrative, adaptive, enabling). We apply this model to review and analyze ninety-nine studies in the current literature and then discuss the limitations and future directions drawing on our findings and theoretical model. We contribute a unifying framework of leadership and team emergence that can be expanded and applied to other settings.     

Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory,research, and practice

Leadership studies concentrate on large-scale societies and organizations with formal hierarchies, large power differences, and diverse membership. Much less is known about leadership in small-scale, homogeneous, and relatively egalitarian societies in which humans have spent most of their existence. We summarize the anthropological literature on leadership from traditional, small-scale societies in terms of (1) the functions and roles of leaders; (2) the traits and behaviors conducive to leader emergence and effectiveness; and (3) the motivations and incentives to assume leadership positions. We address how studies of leadership in small-scale societies inform theory development. By viewing leadership and followership in light of our evolutionary history in small-scale societies, we shed new light on outstanding questions in leadership research and on challenges for leadership practice.     

The nature of followership: Evolutionary analysis and review

From an evolutionary perspective, followership is puzzling because it is not clear why individuals would relinquish their autonomy and set aside their personal goals to follow those of another individual, the leader. This paper analyzes followership from an evolutionary perspective and advances three main conclusions that are not yet part of the leadership literature. First, followership evolved as a strategy to solve a range of cooperation and coordination problems in groups (e.g., collective movement, peacekeeping). Second, individuals who lack the physical, psychological, or social capital to be leaders themselves are more likely to emerge as followers. Third, followership styles, behaviors, and engagement result from (a) variations in the relative pay-offs that accrue to followers vis-à-vis their leader, (b) the adaptive goals pursued by followers, (c) the adaptive challenges that select for different followership styles, and (d) the prevailing leadership style. Together, these conclusions have several implications for followership theory, research, and practice.     

How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Is a happy leader a good leader? A meta-analytic investigation of leader trait affect and leadership

Organizational scholars have long been concerned with identifying traits that differentiate effective leaders from ineffective leaders. Although there has been renewed interest in the role of emotions in leadership, there is currently no quantitative summary of leader trait affectivity and leadership. Thus, the current paper meta-analyzed the relationship between leader trait affectivity and several leadership criteria, including transformational leadership, transactional leadership, leadership emergence, and leadership effectiveness. Results show that leader positive affect is positively related to leadership criteria, whereas leader negative affect is negatively related to leadership criteria, and regression analyses indicate that leader trait affect predicts leadership criteria above and beyond leader extraversion and neuroticism. Additionally, mediational analyses reveal that the relationship between leader trait affect and leadership effectiveness operates through transformational leadership. Taken together, these results contribute to the literature on emotions and leadership by highlighting the role of leader affect as a meaningful predictor of leadership.     

Ecosystem leadership as a dynamic capability

We analyze the role and effect of ecosystem leadership understood as the exercise of effort towards others with the purpose of establishing and maintaining an ecosystem around a focal systemic innovation. While there has been much attention to the firms that sponsor ecosystems in the ecosystem literature, ecosystem leaders are usually characterized in an atheoretical manner, and the emphasis is on, leadership in existing ecosystems, thus neglecting the role leadership might play in ecosystem emergence. We clarify and provide theoretical grounding for the important role of leadership in emerging and maturing ecosystems. Building on transaction cost economics, we conceptualize an ecosystem as a governance structure that enables and sustains coordination and cooperation among multiple economic agents towards a focal innovative value proposition. Our basic argument is that the emergence of such an ecosystems is hampered by coordination and cooperation problems which markets and the price system cannot solve by itself. Resolving these problems requires assistance, and such assistance is what we call ecosystem leadership. To further characterize the exercise of leadership we use Teece's tripartite dynamic capabilities scheme. Leadership enables ecosystem emergence through three externally-oriented dynamic capabilities: facilitating the formation of a shared vision (sensing), inducing others to make ecosystem-specific investments (seizing) and engaging in ad hoc problem solving to create and maintain stability (reconfiguring/transforming). The latter capability in particular often continues to be important in a mature ecosystem. We provide a characterization of these capabilities and argue that the ecosystem leader role in a mature ecosystem likely stems from having successfully exercised these capabilities and that their exercise also puts the leader in a prime position for value capture. We discuss implications of our arguments for ecosystem theories, for managers and for policy makers.     

Revisiting followership through a social identity perspective: The role of collective follower emotion and action

We review the concept of followership, with a specific focus on how followers actively influence leadership outcomes. We examine in particular research from four key areas: social identity perspectives on leadership, intergroup emotion theory, collective action, and reciprocal affect within leader–follower interactions. Our central proposition is that followers engage in actions, driven by both cognitive and affective-based processes, which affect leadership outcomes. Moreover, because leaders are part of the groups they lead and therefore embedded within the social context of a group, we propose that any action that affirms or threatens the salient group will trigger both cognitive and emotional responses from followers towards leaders. These include the extent to which a leader engages in actions that are perceived as (1) self-sacrificial, (2) procedurally fair, and (3) expressing emotions congruent with that of their group. We also propose that the extent to which followers translate their perceptions and emotions towards collective action towards their leaders will be moderated by individual-level group identification and group-level shared identity. To conclude, we highlight theoretical implications in light of these propositions and suggest areas for further research on followership.     

Let’s agree about nice leaders: A literature review and meta-analysis of agreeableness and its relationship with leadership outcomes

In this study, we draw from 22 years of research in leadership to investigate the ambiguous relationship between the personality trait agreeableness and leadership. First, we conduct a comprehensive review of the leadership literature to build a foundational understanding of leader agreeableness that includes providing a broad definition for agreeableness, identifying emerging trends, and proposing an agenda for future research. Second, using the literature review as our theoretical foundation, we conduct a meta-analysis from the same body of literature to quantitatively decompose the relationship between leader agreeableness and leadership emergence and effectiveness. We also hypothesize and test the contextual moderating effects for gender, leadership level, and cultural context (as reflected by individualism-collectivism). Collectively, our findings provide a framework for future research on leadership agreeableness and support the notion that nice (highly agreeable) leaders can emerge as effective leaders.     

Solving the crisis: When agency is the preferred leadership for implementing change

Glass-cliff research shows that female leaders are preferentially selected in a crisis to signal change and not for their leadership qualifications. In parallel, the management literature urges for agentic “masculine” leadership to turn around organizations in crisis. We hypothesized that, regardless of their gender, agentic leaders should be preferred to communal leaders if leadership qualifications and actual change potential motivate leader selection. Three experimental studies demonstrated that agentic (vs. communal) candidates were perceived to match poorly-performing (vs. strongly-performing) companies. This effect was accounted for by perceptions of agentic candidates' higher suitability, higher task-orientation (versus person-orientation), and higher change potential. We discuss that women face ambiguity as to why they become leaders in crisis contexts: because they are perceived as signaling change, stereotypically linked to their gender, or for their perceived agentic qualities as leaders. In contrast, men become crisis leaders due to their perceived agentic change potential.     

Group leadership and shared task representations in decision making groups

The development of adequate shared understanding of the task is of critical importance to group functioning. Group leaders play an important role in this respect, as a key function of leadership is to shape group members' understanding of their job. In the present study we focus on decision making groups with distributed information and examine how group leaders shape members' mental representations of the group decision task through leadership behavior rooted in their own representations of the task. We propose that the extent to which the group leader has task representations that emphasize information exchange and integration affects group members' task representations, group information elaboration, and decision quality. We tested these hypotheses in an experiment (N = 94 three-person groups) in which we manipulated whether a group leader was present and whether this leader held representations emphasizing information elaboration. Results supported the hypotheses, and suggest that team leaders may play an important role in creating a socially shared understanding of team tasks.     

Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integrative framework

One of the biggest challenges facing leaders today is the need to position and enable organizations and people for adaptability in the face of increasingly dynamic and demanding environments. Despite this we know surprisingly little about this topic. In this paper we provide a theoretical synthesis and integrative review of research from strategy, organization theory, innovation, networks, and complexity to provide a framework of leadership for organizational adaptability. Our review shows that leadership for organizational adaptability is different from traditional leadership or leading change. It involves enabling the adaptive process by creating space for ideas advanced by entrepreneurial leaders to engage in tension with the operational system and generate innovations that scale into the system to meet the adaptive needs of the organization and its environment. Leadership for organizational adaptability calls for scholars and practitioners to recognize organizational adaptability as an important organizational outcome, and enabling leadership (i.e., enabling the adaptive process through adaptive space) as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations.     

The role of vertical conflict in the relationship between leader self-enhancement and leader performance

Although studies have shown that inflated self-perceptions of transformational leadership behavior negatively affect leader performance, insight into the underlying processes explaining this relationship is lacking. The current study addresses this gap by identifying vertical conflict between leaders and subordinates as one such underlying process. Using a sample of 52 leaders supervising 259 subordinates, it was found that leader self-enhancement of transformational leadership behavior is significantly and positively related to vertical conflict about both task and relationship issues. Results further indicate that vertical task conflict rather than vertical relationship conflict mediates the negative relationship between leader self-enhancement and leader performance.     

Leader cognition: Approaches and findings

Although few scholars would dispute the point leaders must think, cognition has not, perhaps, received the attention it warrants in studies of leadership. The intent of the present special issue is to examine how cognition influences leader emergence and performance. In this introductory piece we argue that cognitive skills, often domain specific cognitive skills, strongly influence leader emergence and performance. The conditions that moderate the impact of these skills are also examined along with the ways in which cognitive capacities shape subsequent leader behavior. The implications of cognition for leader development and directions for future research are discussed.     

The role of organizational leaders in employee emotion management: A theoretical model

The actions of organizational leaders are important determinants of the emergence, management, and consequences of employee emotional experience. However, the nature and dimensionality of leader emotion management and the behaviors that constitute such management are largely unknown. The authors present a comprehensive, theoretically-derived model of leader emotion management which clarifies the nature of emotion management and its role in leadership. This model also delineates the knowledge and skill-based antecedents of emotion management and the consequences of such management. Specifically, we propose linkages between particular KSAOs and specific emotion management dimensions and between those dimensions and particular individual and organizational outcomes. The model is meant to serve as a framework to guide empirical efforts in investigating the nature and correlates of leader emotion management.     

How feedback about leadership potential impacts ambition,organizational commitment,and performance

In the present research we report results from two experimental studies that examine how feedback about leadership potential impacts leadership ambition, organizational commitment, and performance. Study 1 used an experimental vignette methodology that controls for prior performance. Results show that individuals who receive feedback that they have low potential to be a future leader have lower ambition and organizational commitment relative to those who receive feedback that they have high potential to be a future leader. Study 2 provides evidence of the causal behavioral effects of feedback about leadership potential using a real task effort environment. Results show that participants informed to be unlikely future leaders display lower performance in a subsequent task than participants informed to be likely future leaders. The findings from the two studies demonstrate that information about leadership potential affects subsequent ambition to become leaders as well as performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for the importance of followership, talent management, and leadership succession.     

What explains cultural differences in leadership styles? On the agricultural origins of participative and directive leadership

Why do we observe either participative or directive leadership in organizations? I test an evolutionary-informed theory suggesting that organizational leadership is currently less participative (i.e., close supervision, rare delegation) among societies that used intensive forms of agriculture in the past. Intensification caused increased social complexity and skewed power distribution, promoting the emergence of directive leaders and eventually shaping followers' preferences for and perceptions of leadership. Combining evidence, secondary data, and methods developed in economics, anthropology, and applied psychology, I document a negative relationship between traditional agricultural intensity and followers' participative leadership prototypes. I then study the link between traditional agriculture and reliance on delegation to subordinates across firms. I discuss competing hypotheses, explore the interplay between traditional agriculture and organizational-level factors, and show that traditional agricultural intensity does not predict most other leadership prototypes and management practices. Implications for leadership theory–with a focus on evolutionary approaches–are finally discussed.     

Making ‘my’ problem ‘our’ problem: Warfare as collective action,and the role of leader manipulation

Warfare is a collective action problem, and groups often stand to benefit from the quick and coordinated action that leaders can provide. This basic principle is as true in modern political contexts as it has been across our evolutionary history, and there is growing evidence that leadership has evolved, in part, to solve such collective action problems. Despite the material and reproductive benefits of leadership for groups, leaders may also seek private gains at the expense of group interests. Drawing upon insights from social and evolutionary psychology, I explain how leaders solve collective action problems in warfare, but also how leaders manipulate audience preferences when their own interests do not align with group interests. Specifically, when leaders anticipate great private gain from foreign aggression while facing steep public resistance at home, leaders will misframe the conflict as defensive rather than offensive in nature. I provide an evolutionary analysis that explains why leaders exploit this framing specifically, and I identify the specific aspects of conflict framing that are most likely to be exploited toward this end.     

The effects of leader negative emotions on evaluations of leadership in a crisis situation: The role of anger and sadness

While existing literature on leadership articulates the importance of leader emotion, there has been little attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. Emotions such as anger and sadness have been linked to leaders in times of crisis. The current paper examined the effect of leader emotion on evaluations of leadership in the context of a failed product. In particular, we examined how the expression of anger and sadness influences the evaluation of leaders. Results revealed that a leader expressing sadness was evaluated more favorably than a leader expressing anger. We found that participants' emotion mediated the relationship between leaders' emotion and the evaluation of leaders. Furthermore, accepting responsibility for the crisis led to more favorable evaluations than not accepting responsibility.