Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory, research, and practice
Introduction
Leadership is a primary mechanism by which groups resolve coordination and motivation problems. We define leaders as individuals who have differential influence within a group over the establishment of goals, logistics of coordination, monitoring of effort, and reward or punishment strategies (Bass, B. M., 1990, Day, D. and Antonakis, J., 2012). Leadership can be distributed across multiple group members or concentrated in a single individual, and can range from passive influence to active motivation of followers (Yukl, 2014). However, leadership is not a panacea for organizational problems. Leadership can crowd out cooperation if it is considered illegitimate or if it provokes fear of abuse of power, status envy, or greater competition for rank (Anderson & Brown, 2010). The tension between leadership and dominance – the dark side of leadership – is indicative of a deep evolutionary history of living in groups with dominance hierarchies. In nonhuman primates, dominant individuals use force or threat of force to gain privileged access to food, territory, and mates (Cowlishaw, G. and Dunbar, R. I. M., 1991, de Waal, F., 1982). Dominance hierarchies also shape human societies, but humans frequently level these hierarchies through collaborations enabling them to form – more or less – voluntary leader–follower relations (Boehm, C., 1999, Van Vugt, M., 2006).
It is important to stress that the theories that organize much research in leadership studies (e.g. contingency leadership: Fiedler, 1967; transformational leadership: Bass, 1990; leader–member exchange theory: Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995) were inspired mainly by observations of leadership in the business, military, and political bureaucracies of modern, industrialized, large-scale societies (LSSs). While leadership is ubiquitous across human societies, leadership tends to be less institutionalized, more egalitarian, and more situational in small-scale societies (SSSs) (Hooper, P., et al., 2010, von Rueden, C., et al., 2014a). These societies, in which humans spent more than 95% of their history as a species, are in general characterized by small communities, pooling of resources within and across extended families, food production in the absence of significant technology (e.g. foraging), and few formal institutions governing group life.
Can knowledge about SSSs inform the study of leadership in large-scale societies? Much leadership in LSSs still occurs informally within households, churches, sports teams, or other community organizations. The face-to-face, spontaneous nature of leader–follower interactions in these contexts is fairly similar to those in which leadership often emerges in SSSs. But the contribution of SSSs to leadership research does not only hinge on descriptive similarity, but rather on its theoretical importance. What we observe of leader–follower relationships in SSSs helps us formulate hypotheses of leadership and followership in any context. This is because ethnographically recent SSSs are more representative than LSSs of the range of social environments in which the human mind evolved. By studying leadership within and across modern SSSs, we gain insight into how the minds of leaders and followers in any society operate as they do, including in formal, complex, modern organizations.
Whereas LSSs with extensive bureaucracies emerged only ~ 10,000 years ago with the spread of agriculture, humans have lived in SSSs for ~ 200,000 years, and our hominid ancestors for several millions of years (Diamond, 1997). With agriculture, populations became larger, denser, and more culturally diverse (Livi-Bacci, 1997), which are properties that tend to increase intra-group conflict and the difficulty of coordination (Johnson, G., 1982, Olson, M., 1965, Ostrom, E., 1990). LSSs that resisted collapse from conflict and coordination failures were those who adopted bureaucracies with multi-tiered, formalized leadership structures to help solve the problems of life in large groups (Johnson, G., 1982, Richerson, P. and Boyd, R., 1999, Richerson, P., et al., 2003). Yet the recency of LSSs suggests that much of the evolved decision-making underlying leadership remains tailored to group life in SSSs (Petersen, M.B., 2015, Price, M. and Van Vugt, M., 2014, Spisak, B. R., et al., 2011, Tooby, J., et al., 2006, Van Vugt, M., et al., 2008a).
Section snippets
Evolutionary approaches to leadership
Our approach to leadership unites an evolutionary perspective – which considers “why” minds evolved as they did – with a proximate perspective — which considers “how” minds operate in present circumstances (Scott-Phillips, Dickins, & West, 2011). Human minds are not blank slates upon which experience is impressed, but are equipped with evolved decision rules – sometimes referred to as cognitive adaptations – that regulate our motivations and beliefs (Pinker, S., 2002, Tooby, J. and Cosmides,
What are the functions of leaders in SSSs?
SSSs, particularly hunter–gatherers, tend to be egalitarian. By “egalitarian”, anthropologists generally mean equal rights and privileges among group members, though women and children tend to have lower status, on average, compared to adult men (Fried, 1967). Both ecological and institutional forces help maintain egalitarianism. In the absence of significant material wealth or storable or predictable food packages, widespread resource sharing emerges to buffer risk in production and creates
Age
A cursory review of the correlates of leadership in SSSs suggests that leadership correlates with age. Cross-culturally, older adults often fill leadership roles, in part because they have had more time to accrue task-relevant knowledge (Henrich, J. and Gil-White, F., 2001, Schniter, E., et al., 2015, Silverman, P. and Maxwell, R.J., 1978). Older individuals may also have more wisdom, which can be defined as general knowledge regarding ecological or interpersonal dilemmas and an ability to make
Benefits for leadership in SSSs
In LSSs, leadership is often rewarded with high salaries and formal privileges (Bass, B. M., 1990, Norton, M. and Ariely, D., 2011). Yet in SSSs, these forms of compensation are typically absent, and leadership may even carry substantial costs. Dispute resolution has the potential to drag leaders' into others' conflicts, and leaders are expected to volunteer for dangerous tasks. For example, Yanomamo headmen take responsibility for patrolling the village perimeter for raiders (Chagnon, 1983).
Contributions and implications of SSS leadership
Study of the functions, determinants, and rewards of leadership in SSSs has tremendous importance in its own right, since SSSs encompass the majority of human societies over our history, and those remaining benefit from outside political assistance as they and their leadership navigate the forces of globalization. However, our principal aim is to communicate the theoretical importance of leadership in SSSs for the interpretation and prediction of leader and follower behavior in LSSs. As we
Personality
In modern organizations, individuals who are narcissistic or over-confident are often selected as leaders (Brunell, A., et al., 2008, Judge, T. A. and Bono, J. E., 2000, Paunonen, S., et al., 2006, Reuben, E., et al., 2012), despite null or even negative consequences for groups (Brunell, A., et al., 2008, Campbell, W. K., et al., 2005, Maccoby, M., 2007, Malmendier, U. and Tate, G., 2005). This may be indicative of evolved leader preferences mismatching with the evolutionary novel conditions of
Skill
The influence granted to leaders in LSSs often extends well beyond their domain of expertise, due in part to assumptions that skill in one domain predicts skill in another (Yukl, 2014). Such assumptions may be tied to social learning mechanisms that evolved in SSSs to favor broad imitation of successful individuals (i.e. prestige bias). Broad imitation of a successful individual, a leader, is adaptive because imitators are often unable to identify what particular traits beget a particular skill
Leader status and compensation
The rewards to successful leaders in LSSs are unparalleled in SSSs, and they contribute to tremendous levels of wealth inequality in modern society. In the U.S., average citizens vastly underestimate the extent of wealth inequality (Norton & Ariely, 2011). This misconception may be due in part to optimistic perceptions of social mobility (Norton & Ariely, 2011). Underestimations of wealth inequality may also result from the concentration of wealthy and poor into different communities, limiting
Conclusion
Explanation of any behavior is incomplete without consideration of its proximate determinants as well as its evolutionary origins (Scott-Phillips et al., 2011). By studying leadership in SSSs, we gain insight into the conditions that shaped the evolution of our social psychology of leadership and followership. We improve our understanding of why leaders and followers act as they do in any society, including the effect of context (e.g. group size, external threat) on leader and follower
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