PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP. AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Sergiu BĂLAN a*, Lucia Ovidia VREJA a
a The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania
ABSTRACT The paper presents extensively, from a theoretical point of view, the concepts of leader and follower and their extensions, leadership and followership, as well as the role of leaders and followers in crowd coordination and common action. The main approach of the concepts is that of evolutionary psychology, as this theoretical framework indicate that both leadership and followership are evolutionary adaptations, their properties and characteristics being also found among other species of animals that manifest sociality. The attempt to pinpoint the evolutionary origin of both leadership and followership, and the common features that animals and humans share in terms of leaders and followers is a necessary undertaking for explaining leadership in organizations and, possibly, in improving the quality of leadership.
KEYWORDS: adaptation, environmental mismatch, evolutionary psychology, followership, leadership, sociality.
1. INTRODUCTION
The concepts of leadership and followership are widely used in social sciences, although they might be defined differently, depending on the type of collected empirical data and on the content and focus of analysis. For instance, anthropological research indicate that leadership is a human universal, found in every society (Boehm, 1999), albeit having different forms and being founded on distinct characteristics, while various studies in social psychology indicate that leadership is an emergent attribute of any group, big or small, as empirical data indicate that whenever a number of people gather together, a formal or informal leader implicitly appear (van Vugt, 2006), to coordinate the actions of the group. Although the specific literature in social sciences is abundant in definitions and theories of leadership, they fail to explain what is the origin of leadership and followership, why the emergence of leaders seems to be a necessity of any kind of groups or what are the benefits of adopting a certain type of social behavior, especially that of a follower. Moreover, the same literature lacks extensive and consistent explanations for followership, given the widely held opinion that humans, as well as other primates, are very competitive and hierarchically structured species, with individuals permanently trying to achieve the alpha-position in a group. The current paper is an attempt to systematize the various types of explicative theory, with an emphasis on why they are unsuccessful in offering a generally accepted explanation for the emergence of leadership and the existence of followership. By adopting the evolutionary theory stance, the paper includes a literature review and a critical disquisition on the main features and strong points of the main theoretical frameworks of analysis, including the evolutionary one.
* E-mail address: [email protected] 1185 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS
2.1 Theories of leadership Complex questions such as what is leadership, why leaders emerge in any group, how leaders act and coordinate the actions of their followers, what are the essential qualities of people who stand out in a crowd have been the concerns of various specialists in different disciplines. While their efforts have led to no less than ten or even eleven theories of leadership, briefly presented below, it is worth mentioning that neither of them fully explains the intricate and plentiful aspects of leadership, as they all provide “proximate” explanations, meaning that they only “describe how leadership manifests itself and what forms it can take”, without touching upon why “leaders (or followers) exist at all” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). The Great Man theory is, most probably, the oldest theory of leadership, with theoreticians going back in history as far as the Greek philosopher Aristotle. According to this theory, “leaders are born not made”, they are special human beings, chosen to do great things or dramatically change their environments or even the world, being naturally endowed with superior virtues such as intelligence, wisdom, determination, morality or strength. Such Great Men, usually emperors or formal leaders who led societies or countries to glorious victories or helped them overcome extremely harsh times, are those “special” individuals who have passed the test of history and have found their place in the pantheon of exceptional figures. As the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (2008) put it, the “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here”. Although the theory is still used today, especially in the business field, to explain how noteworthy “saviors” salvage companies from bankruptcy or societies from total destruction, it fails to clarify why such leaders live undistinctive and unremarkable lives for most of their time, have no out-of- the-ordinary qualities for long periods of time and display heroism only under certain circumstances (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). The trait theory, actually derived from the Great Man theory, assumes that what make some people leaders are the traits they display, attributes that might be both innate or acquired through education. Although, initially, the essential traits, if inborn, or skills and competencies, if learned, of a leader were “intelligence, extroversion and ambition” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011), various theoreticians added later a long list of attributes, such as “assertiveness, dominance, energy, self- confidence, persistence, alertness” (Stodgill, 1974) or competencies, such as “creativity, oral fluency, diplomacy, persuasiveness and social skills” (Bass & Bass, 2008). Although such traits or competencies are indeed necessary or, at least, desirable, for individuals to stand out of the crowd and assume leadership positions in various groups and situations, not all of them are mandatory. Moreover, the trait theory assumes that all the leaders in all the fields of activity or in any time need to have the same traits, which is not the case, as different situations require different skills, abilities, traits. The psychoanalytic theory starts from the idea of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (2012), that groups or societies are families in miniature, therefore the leader plays the role of the father of the “primitive tribe”. According to this theory, leadership stems from an individual’s childhood relations with his father, some leaders trying to mirror the behavior of their imposing fathers, while others trying to achieve greatness in order to compensate for their absent fathers. In either case, the experience of the early years of childhood is decisive in determining the leaders’ stance. Moreover, based on the father-child relationship, more precisely on the love or fear emotions binding the two entities (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011), psychoanalysis would explain both the leadership and followership behaviors, with followers serving their leaders out of love or fear. Although alluring, this theory is rather simplistic and speculative, giving no importance to other factors that shape and influence the personality and behavior of any individual, such as dispositional or situational factors. 1186 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
The charismatic leadership theory presumes that some individuals, especially political and religious figures, captivate followers based on their charisma, something that is almost impossible to define, yet “you know it when you see it” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). Charismatic leaders attract followers not based on their acts, on what they did, but on their personality, skills and characteristics, in other words, on what they are, therefore “charisma, oratory, manipulation and intimidation are often more important than wisdom, special expertise and administrative experience” (Ludwig, 2002, 5). According to this theory, charismatic leadership is demonstrated by individuals whose personalities act like a “social glue” and who are able to bring together large numbers of people, especially strangers, who adhere to the leader’s ideology or are willing to bring their contribution to achieving a high-order purpose. The charismatic leadership theory, nevertheless, fails to explain what charisma is, whether it is innate or learned, why historical figures identified as charismatic leaders are not always positioned on the side of the good, or why this charisma seems to work better and influence followers in hard times rather than in peaceful times. The behavioral theory is, to a certain degree, the opposite of the charismatic leadership theory, focusing on what the leaders are doing, and assuming that leadership is the result of specific, effective behaviors that would demonstrate, as the famous Blake-Mouton managerial grid indicate, both “concern for employees” and “concern for task” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). In terms of concern for followers or employees, a perspective of the same theory indicate that there are two main types of leading people, providing the so-called Theory X/Theory Y approach (McGregor, 1968). The Theory X leaders or managers presume that the “average human being” dislikes work, has no willingness to assumes responsibility, lacks ambition and tries to avoid any activity, while the Theory Y leaders suppose that employees are capable of hard work if they are motivated properly. Depending on their beliefs, leaders or managers will adopt an authoritarian or a participative style of leadership (McGregor, 1968). At large, the theory suggests that leadership is based on style rather than on natural abilities of leaders, therefore leaving room for improvement or adaptation of the leadership behavior. While promising, the behavioral theory is unsuccessful in explaining why in certain situations the autocratic style of leadership is better than the participative style, and vice versa. The situational theory starts from the premise than an effective leadership depends on the characteristics of the situation, as certain circumstances or tasks require a “strong” leadership, while others require a “permissive” leadership (Tannenbaum & Schmidt, 1973). Accordingly, it is not the style or the abilities of the leaders that matter most, but the situation, which imposes a certain course of action. In rapidly changing environment or in difficult times, such as wars or emergencies, a participative leadership would surely lead to failures or even catastrophes, an autocratic leadership style being an absolute necessity. A permissive or participative leadership style, on the other side, is better suited for peaceful situations or unchallenged organizations, especially given the fact that in such calm circumstances a strong leadership might lead to psychological reactance (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). While it is appropriate to consider that different situations demand for different solutions and, therefore, different leadership styles, the situational theory does not do much in terms of leaders’ characteristics or why some individuals are somewhat more inclined to adopt one instead of the other leadership style. The contingency theory is an extension of the situational theory, besides the characteristics of the situation, also taking into account a series of other parameters such as the type of organization in question, the requirements of the goal to be achieved, the kind or size of power the leader has (Fiedler, 1967). These variables, especially the type of organization and the “functional specialty of the manager” will determine whether the leader is task-oriented, interested primarily in achieving the goal, or relationship-oriented, mainly interested in maintaining the relations with employees, customers or other entities (Fiedler, 1967, 241). Based on the combination of these variables and 1187 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA their importance in a given task or a given situation, various authors identified diverse leadership categories, each being more fitted in a certain circumstance. The contingency theory of leadership, while satisfactory in explaining some aspects of leadership, especially in organizations, has the same problems as the situational theory, being unable to identify the origin of leadership in the first place. The transactional leadership theory is focused on leaders who adopt an autocratic style of managing people and getting things done, the organizational structure (with strict rules, clear positions and relations between positions, transparent chains of command) being of great importance (Burns, 1978). The transactional leader is to be found mainly in bureaucracies, where every aspect of the organization is clearly defined and rules are strictly followed, The main concern of the transactional leader is to fulfill the tasks, using rewards for success and punishments for failure (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011), manifesting no interest in creativity, in negotiating with employees or in adapting the rules to people’s needs. The transformational leadership theory, on the other side, is focused on leaders who embrace an expressive style of managing people, primarily trying to get things done by winning the hearts of the employees and inspiring them to become completely involved in achieving the organization’s goals (Burns, 1978). The transformational leaders are the opposite of the transactional leaders, as rules and positions and relations are rather negotiated between the leader and the followers than imposed from up to bottom. While the transactional leaders are accompanied by their followers out of fear or based on an instrumental need (for instance, the salary), the transformational leaders are followed by their adherents out of admiration or based on an expressive need (for instance, the need to belong). While transactional leadership is concerned with modal or means-values, such as “honesty, responsibility, fairness, the honoring of commitments”, the transformational leadership is more concerned with “end-values, such as liberty, justice, equality” (Burns, 1978, 426). Both transactional and transformational leadership theories are successful at describing types of leadership present in various kind of organizations, yet they exclude the possibility of the existence of a prototype leadership, valid in all circumstances. The distributed (or dispersed/emergent) leadership theory refers to the situation in which the hierarchy in an organization is rather flexible than rigid, with employees or followers even participating in establishing the ranking. The distributed leadership is found in many companies, both small and large, being necessary today in certain environments characterized by an increase in the quantity of information, the quality of technology and the new challenges posed by globalization and interconnectedness (Barry, 1991). In such organizations, the power is dispersed among various types of employees, the leadership roles being “shared naturally rather than formally assigned (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). Apparently, this type of leadership is mutually beneficial for leaders and followers, as employees are happier and “bossless teams” are “the key to solving complex problems, increasing productivity, and heightening creativity” (Barry, 1991, 31). The distributed leadership theory describes convincingly a specific type of leadership, possibly the leadership of the future, yet this approach is too narrow to count significantly in any meaningful and comprehensive explanation of leadership and followership. The servant leadership theory focuses on individuals who are “affirmative builders of a better society”, who assume the role of fighting injustice, hypocrisy, and all the bad things, being mainly interested in the benefit of the group rather that in their own advantages (Greenleaf, 2002). Selfless servant leaders give up their interests and are even willing to pay a cost in order to achieve the good for the group or society, being the opposite of selfish and profit-oriented leaders found today in corporate organizations. Their actions are based on long-term goals rather than on immediate gains, being the ones that provide inspiration for their followers, along with the energy to “initiate and provide the ideas and the structure” for a better world, as well as with the bravery to “take the risks of failure along with the chances of success” (Greenleaf, 2002).
1188 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
While the servant leadership theory depicts a very attractive and even desirable type of leadership, it does not analyze the question of why some individuals would sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group. As Dutch evolutionary psychologist Mark van Vugt, professor in evolutionary psychology, work and organizational psychology and business consultant in organizational psychology and organizational neuroscience has put it, the fundamental questions concerning the phenomena of leadership and followership still remain unasked and unanswered. Those are the „why” questions: “First, however, we need to ask the fundamental question that so far remains unasked in leadership literature: why do we have leadership and followership anyway? Why do we cluster together in a led group? Why doesn’t each man strive solely for his own welfare and pleasure?” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). The answers to these questions could be found, according to van Vugt and Ahuja (2011), only if we use a special frame of interpretation, grounded in evolutionary theory, and especially in evolutionary psychology in order to understand the main leadership and followership related issues, but also some others, such as which are the people’s favorite or the less preferred leadership styles, what is the importance of innate personality traits of leaders, why is there a gender gap and a glass ceiling in leadership and so on. Therefore, in order to fully comprehend this original approach, we must at first discuss a few ideas and principles concerning the fundaments of Darwinian evolutionary theory and of evolutionary psychology.
2.2 The evolutionary theoretical perspective Even if the idea of biological evolution was by no means a new one in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin is credited with its most famous formulation (Bălan, 2014). Darwin’s theory of evolution of biological species by means of natural selection was resumed by the author himself in the Summary at the end of the fourth chapter of his famous book, On the Origin of Species (1859, 126-127), as follows: “If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical ratio of increase of each species, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same manner as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection; and it leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life”. According to American biologist Eugene V. Koonin (2012, 2-3), there are at least three aspects of Darwinian theory that gave it a unique and decisive character: (1) The fact that Darwin has built his perspective on evolution in a strictly naturalistic and rationalist manner, without introducing in explanation the idea of a divine project, or other teleological principles, as the other evolutionists of his time did. (2) The Darwinian theory envisions a specific mechanism of evolutionary processes that is simple, direct and easy to understand even by those who are not specialists in biology, namely the corroborated action of the hereditary transmitted variation and of the natural selection, which together have as a result the preferential survival of individuals that are best adapted to the environmental conditions. (3) Darwin extended the applicability of the idea of evolution to the whole history of life on Earth, which he schematically represented in the form of a tree structure (which replaces the medieval scala naturae), and formulated the postulate that all present life forms, as well as all those that have ever existed do descend from one common ancestor. 1189 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
Another famous biologist, Ernst Mayr (2002, 209), in turn, indicates a number of five ideas that constitute the fundamental elements of Darwinian theory, singularize it and give its strength and elegance: (1) The idea that species are not immutable, but have a certain (reduced) degree of variability, which is manifested in the small mutations that occur at the hereditary transmission of physical and functional traits from one generation to another; (2) The idea of branched evolution, according to which all living organisms descend from common ancestors; (3) The principle that evolution is a gradual phenomenon, which does not present jumps or discontinuities; (4) The idea of species’ multiplication over time, which is the origin of the extraordinary diversity of the living world; (5) The principle of natural selection. Therefore, as the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (1996, 86) points out, it becomes immediately clear that what gives Darwinism its great novelty and importance is not the idea of evolution per se, which was not a new one, but the idea of evolution by means of natural selection, that is, the identification of a natural immanent mechanism able to explain why species evolve after all. The principle of revolutionary divergence and the metaphor of the tree of life highlight an extremely interesting feature, perhaps the most important of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, as Daniel Dennett (1996, 51) observes when summarizing in an original way the argument from the Origin of Species as follows: “Life on Earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree — the Tree of Life — by one algorithmic process or another”. The fundamental idea to be kept in mind is that of the algorithmic character of the process of evolution by natural selection, which becomes obvious in the way Darwin himself resumes it in the summary of Chapter IV of his work, quoted above, from which it is clear that, if certain initial conditions regarding life on Earth are met, then the occurrence of a certain type of result, namely speciation, is guaranteed. Any algorithm, argues Dennet (1996, 50-51), regardless of whether it is an evolutionary mechanism or a computer program, has three fundamental characteristics: (1) It is neutral with respect to the substrate of its application, meaning that the strength of the procedure is the same regardless of the material circumstances in which the algorithm is applied, because it derives from its logical structure: the algorithm of dividing a number by another number is the same, regardless of whether the operation is done with a pencil on paper, mentally, or on the computer screen. (2) It does not require rational control of the execution of each step, nor of the passage from one step to the next, that is, although the design of an algorithm may require considerable thought effort, sometimes even a spark of genius, once it is developed, its application is so simple that it can be left to a completely incompetent person or even a machine. For example, a culinary recipe, if written clearly enough and without the use of specialized jargon, can be followed even by someone who does not have any kind of cooking skills. (3) The algorithm offers the guarantee of obtaining the expected result. Whatever the purpose for which the algorithm was built, it will always reach it, provided each step is carefully executed. What Darwin has discovered is therefore an algorithm, or rather a class of algorithms that prescribe how the evolution of species occurs through the mechanism of natural selection. There are a few important philosophical consequences that result immediately from this understanding of the evolutionary process as an algorithm, and which prompted Dennett (1996) to describe Darwin’s idea through suggestive expressions such as ‘Darwin's dangerous idea’ or ‘universal acid’, with reference to its profound consequences on the subsequent theoretical developments. First, it allows us to understand clearly now why evolution is not, as it has long been believed, a process destined to produce finally the human species, but only one in which its emergence was made possible, without being necessary. Evolution is an algorithm similar to a competency-based tournament, always eliminating the less fitted and keeping in competition the one that happens to be better adapted to the selective environmental conditions. Secondly, it makes it possible to understand how evolutionary processes took place and take place without the need for any initial project or any divine providential intervention, but only by virtue of the existence of this algorithm, 1190 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA which has no intentionality or teleology, be it intrinsic or external. Third, if we admit that natural selection is an algorithmic process, it means that, if the initial Darwinian conditions (heredity, variation, and selective pressure of the environment) are met, then, in accordance with the idea of substrate neutrality, we can use this principle to explain the appearance and evolution not only of the phenotypic traits but also of the behavioral characteristics of all living beings, including those of the human being itself, and even of cultural phenomena, such as habits, ideas, fashion, the rules of social organization, certain taboos and so on. This is the most probable reason why in a very often quoted paragraph from the end of his book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin writes: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (Darwin, 1859, 488). Some of the first attempts to apply the evolutionary algorithm to explain behavioral traits belong to Darwin himself. In 1871 and 1872, he published two substantial monographs (initially intended to compose a single work), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, which are concerned less with the anatomical aspects of evolution of the human species, focusing instead on the evolution of mental abilities. Unlike his co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, who believed that the specific human mental faculties can only be explained by the providential intervention of a divine creator, Darwin tried to show that the differences between human beings and other mammals in terms of intelligence and affectivity were not as great as it was believed. In The Descent of Man (1981), he argues that there are a whole host of behavioral traits common to humans and animals: self-preservation, sexual love, mother’s love for the new-born baby. It is easy to see the tendency towards anthropomorphizing animal behavior, to which Darwin fell victim (bringing a whole host of critics to his interpretations), obvious in The Expression of Emotions (1998), where he listed a multitude of facial expressions common to humans and animals, seeking to show that they are signs of similar emotional experiences, for example, the fact that fear acts in the same way on animals and on humans, causing identical physical reactions. But what does it mean, in the end, to apply the evolutionary algorithm to explain behavioral traits? According to the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen (1963), the 1973 Nobel Prize laureate, there are four fundamental methodological questions that must be answered when seeking an evolutionary explanation for any human (or non-human) behavior. The questions Tinbergen talks about are intended to identify: (1) the phylogenetic cause of the behavioral trait (to elucidate its history and development over evolutionary time); (2) the ontogenetic cause of the behavioral trait (to clarify its history and development over the lifetime of the individual); (3) the functional or ultimate cause of the behavioral trait (to understand how the behavior in question improves the general adaptation – the chances of survival and reproduction – of an individual); and (4) the motivational or proximate cause of the behavioral trait (to understand which situations and causes trigger a certain behavioral response of the individual organism). The systematic beginnings of the evolutionary investigation of human behavior were made by a discipline, new at the time, called ‘ethology’, which began with the research undertaken by Oskar Heinroth and Charles Otis Withman, based on the idea of instinctively caused behaviors and which have sought to highlight the different behavioral patterns characteristic for certain species. The most famous representatives of this discipline are Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch (laureates of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1972), who tried to demonstrate that the methods used in comparative morphology can also be used in the study of animal behavior, so that the behavioral differences between species are as useful as the morphological differences for understanding their evolution. More than his other colleagues, Lorenz has always been convinced that comparative research on animal behavior creates the conditions for a better understanding of the human being, so that many of his books contain concluding chapters that extrapolate from 1191 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA observations regarding animals to conclusions regarding aspects of human behavior. For example, in his writing on aggression, he argues that all conflicts and wars are manifestations of man’s instinctual aggression, and no attempt to eliminate these behaviors has any chance of success (Lorenz, 1963). Based on such attempts, a new branch of ethology has been established, human ethology, an area in which, apart from Lorenz, significant other contributions have also been made by Nikolaas Tinbergen, John Bowlby and Iränäus Eibl-Eibesfeld. However, human ethology did not have a significant echo at the time, on the one hand by scientists because it was objected that it is impossible to determine whether a certain human behavior is based on instinct (i.e. innate) as long as no human can be isolated from its cultural environment and studied, so that social influence can never be eliminated, and on the other hand by ideological critics, who have fought against interpretations such as that of aggression mentioned here on the grounds that they would be used to argue that war and other negative aspects of today’s world are inevitable. However, ethology remains important because other scientists, like Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith and Edward O. Wilson have been trained in this field, thus formulating important ideas, like that of kin selection or reciprocal altruism, and specific theories, such as the evolutionary form of game theory that contributed to the emergence of a new field of investigation of animal and human behaviors, namely sociobiology. Sociobiology was defined by E.O. Wilson (1975, 4) as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior”. It brings together studies on animal demographics, population biology, communication, group behaviors, parental behaviors, aggressiveness, in various species, starting from microorganisms and up to mammals and humans. Specifically, sociobiologists have tried to reject the idea formulated by ethologists, that individual organisms have acquired, by means of natural selection, behaviors (such as aggressiveness, certain vocalizations, or behaviors related to reproduction) that are aimed at the good of the species. The answer provided by the sociobiologists was that a simpler and more efficient perspective consists in considering the genes as the fundamental unit of selection. For example, they tried to explain altruistic behaviors: why do certain individuals (e.g. in the case of certain species of bees, ants, wasps) do behave in such a way as to diminish their own chances of reproducing and increase those of others? The answer was William Hamilton’s idea of kin selection, based on a calculation method designed to predict if and when a certain altruistic behavior is likely to be selected. Hamilton thus discovered that such behavior occurs towards other individuals with whom the altruist is related, so that he shares with them a large proportion of his genes. However, these ideas were criticized by a group of psychologists, such as Donald Symons, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss and Steven Pinker, members of a school of thought that emerged in the 1980s, and called “evolutionary psychology”, who believed that sociobiologists and behavioral ecologists were wrong when they tried to apply evolutionary ideas directly to behavioral structures, and that a better approach would be to apply them to the psychological mechanisms behind these structures. As Cosmides and Tooby (1987, 281) point out: “natural selection cannot select for behaviour per se; it can only select for mechanisms that produce behavior”. The central idea of this theory is that human mind is modular, composed of several subsystems that in fact represent mechanisms evolved throughout the history of our species in response to the selective pressures of the environment, that have affected our ancestors during different periods of the past. The most important of these periods is considered to be the Pleistocene, which began about 2,500,000 years ago and ended about 11,500 years ago, so it represents 99% of the history of our species, during which time our ancestors were hunters and gatherers in the African savanna. During this period, under the influence of environmental pressures, psychological mechanisms have been formed, that offer people a set of universal mental adaptations that lie behind our cognitive processes. It is considered that natural selection must necessarily have favored those mechanisms that have managed to solve with maximum efficiency specific problems for our ancestors, such as 1192 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA those regarding aggression, morality, selection criteria for reproductive partners or social relations (Brown & Richerson, 2014, 108-109). This period of formation of the mechanisms of the human mind has been called the “ancestral environment”, or the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”, and if we will gain a good knowledge and understanding of the adaptive problems that people have encountered in this context, we will be able to discover how the mental mechanisms designed to solve them were formed, mechanisms we have inherited and still poses to this day. The methodological principles of evolutionary psychology, i.e. the steps that researchers should follow in order to identify the adaptive psychological mechanisms were summarized by Tooby and Cosmides (1989, 29-35) as follows: (1) Using the principles of evolutionary theory for building a model of an adaptive problem that the human mind must solve. (2) The attempt to determine how this problem appeared in the ancestral environment and what were the selective pressures of the environment. (3) Integration of the adaptive problem model with the available information on the conditions in the ancestral environment. Next, the problem that the human mind had to solve must be seen as a problem of computation, of information processing, and we should build a computational model of it, based on which hypotheses could be made about what a mental mechanism able to solve the problem could look like. (4) Development of competing hypothetical models of mental mechanisms that could be solutions for the specific adaptive problem. (5) Carrying out field experiments and observations to eliminate the less suitable models, until only one remains. (6) Comparison of the model with the behavioral patterns that can be found in the conditions of contemporary life. Regarding the psychological mechanisms thus studied, some researchers prefer to reduce them to cognitive processes, while others, such as David Buss, include also skills, emotions, preferences and inclinations. Among the more thoroughly studied are very different elements, such as: the preference for a certain type of landscape (similar to savanna); the fear of reptiles and insects; the preference for certain characteristics of sexual partners, considered as attractive; the disgust induced by certain smells or tastes; the ability to learn spoken language that has phonemes, morphemes and syntax; jealousy; ability to detect others’ attempts to deceive us; ability to decipher facial expressions (which are everywhere associated with the same emotions - anger, indifference, joy, excitement, etc.); the repulsion for incest; altruism. They were considered to be innate, which is why some researchers called them “instincts” (which sometimes gave rise to confusion), and in the opinion of evolutionary psychologists, such as Buss, or anthropologists, such as Donald Brown or Christoph Antweiller, the number of these mechanisms, also called the “universals” of the human mind because they are common to all humans and relatively constant (they have formed over long periods of time and change very hard), is a very large one, of the order of hundreds (Brown, 1991; Antweiler, 2016).
3. THE EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION OF LEADERSHIP
As Mark van Vugt and Anjana Ahuja have argued in their “evolutionary theory of leadership” (ETL), two other very important behavioral patterns that emerged during the course of human evolution (and not exclusively human, but specific to other social species, too) are leadership and followership associated behaviors, which are instinctive and unforced: “Evolution selected for a combination of leaders and followers in human society; a template for these behaviors eventually became ‘hard-wired’ into the human brain” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). In the evolutionary theory of leadership, leadership is simply defined as „design for inducing others to coordinate their actions or goals with those of the individual, the leader, to foster the leader’s proximate goals”, while followership is described as „design to coordinate one’s actions or goals with those of another individual - the leader - in order to foster the leader’s proximate goals” (van Vugt & Kurzban, 2007, 230). 1193 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
By simply using the word “design” to define leadership and followership, the ETL suggests that they are both adaptations, selected over a long period of time in order to solve specific problems. Those behaviors were selected because they offered substantial survival advantages to those groups and tribes that teamed up to solve together the main survival problems and came to have strong leadership and constant, disciplined followership, as compared to those loose groups, formed by solitary and more independent individuals, and so these tendencies gradually became part of the fabric of human social life. In other words, human social groups that had efficient leadership which foster cooperation (King, Johnson & van Vugt, 2009) did much better than leaderless groups, and therefore strong leadership and efficient followership became preconditions of success in the ancestral environment, and all human groups that lacked them did eventually die out. The members of those who survived, and us, their descendants, carry in our genes the instinctive propensities to live in led groups, to be team players instead of individualists, to be naturally obedient followers most of the time, to crave belonging and sometimes, rarely, to assume the position of the leader: “in short, leadership and followership are problem-solving strategies that have arisen as a consequence of our species facing problems requiring coordination, such as group decision-making, collective migration and group defence. The process of natural selection winnowed down the population to what we see today: a society in which human leadership and followership are ubiquitous” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). The adaptive value, both biologically and culturally, of the leadership behaviors are almost immediately visible, because becoming a leader is the best way of achieving one’s goals, by transforming them in collective objectives (Spisak, O’Brien, Nicholson & van Vugt, 2015). The main adaptive benefits of being among the leaders were always of financial, social and reproductive nature, or ‘the three S’s’: salary, status and sex: “In fact, the three S’s have a clear relationship to each other, and to ELT: the ultimate evolutionary aim is reproductive success, which must be achieved through sex, which means catching the eye of sexual partners, which means being a man of status. And how is status signified today? Through salary. And so, thanks to evolutionary leadership theory, we have a thread linking money to power to sex” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). Followership has also at least three kinds of advantages, too: humans are inclined to submit to a ruler when they think that the group unity and survival is threatened, when they are not able to make their own decision and need to be told what to do next, and also when they want to learn from the ruler the ways of leadership, in the hope of becoming someday leaders themselves (van Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008). In other words, “the avenue of evolutionary reasoning brings us to this conclusion: the three main benefits of followership for our ancestors were group cohesion (safety in numbers), knowledge during a time of uncertainty (not eating the poisonous mushroom) and the opportunity to be groomed for a leadership position” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). If we will try to understand leadership and followership by using Tinbergen’s four questions mentioned above, we will get the main principles of an evolutionary explanation of these behaviours: (1) The “why” question: why did they evolved in so many social species, humans included? Because of the substantial benefits of joint and coordinate action in obtaining needed resources and security, whereas only leadership could achieve this kind of coordination, fact proved in the case of many social species. (2) The phylogenetic “when” question: when did this behavior appeared in humans, and are there similar traits in other species? As the history of life on Earth shows, it appeared millions of years ago, in various species, and among others in apes and some other of our close relatives and ancestors, from whom we have inherited it. (3) The ontogenetic “when” question: when does it appear in the life of individuals? Various research data do suggest that it is manifest almost at birth, it is spontaneous and automatic, and also that the traits associated with leadership are highly heritable. (4) The “how” question: how does the ability to become a leader manifest itself, what makes a good leader or follower, what personality traits distinguish them? According to van Vugt and Ahuja (2011), there are a few inherited traits, determined by genetic factors, that make their owners more prone to become leaders. These are some of “the big 1194 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 13th INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November, 2019, BUCHAREST, ROMANIA five” traits of the personality scale (agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness to experience) and some other ones, called honesty or humility. Leadership is strongly correlated with extraversion, with openness to new experiences, with intelligence (most strongly with verbal ability), neutrally with agreeableness and negatively with neuroticism. On the negative side, “people who score highly on the first two out of the three so-called Dark Triad traits – Machiavellianism and narcissism (but not psychopathy) – often surface as temporary leaders because their charm and enthusiasm attract followers. In the long run, however, their selfishness and exploitative nature bring them, and often their group, down” (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2011). It is true, on the other hand, that evolutionary psychologists have understood that the natural environment and especially the social environment in which people live today are very different from those of our Pleistocene ancestors. The modern urban environment, the institutions, the relationships between people living in much larger social groups, the ever-changing modern technology are, from the point of view of human evolutionary history, some very recent innovations, so evolutionary psychologists have formulated what is called the “the mismatch hypothesis” between our mental adaptations that were born in the Pleistocene and the present living conditions of human beings. For this reason, inadequacy makes some behavioral patterns inherited from our distant ancestors no longer appropriate today, within the artificial world in which we live, meaning that they no longer have adaptive value but, on the contrary, are maladaptive (Laland & Brown, 2002, 154-155). The ‘the mismatch hypothesis’ has its place in the context of ELT also, with individuals finding it hard to adapt to the current society, which is “much larger and socially more complex”, to identify in leaders of today, especially in big, formal corporations, the characteristics that they better and easier respond to (van Vugt, Johnson & Kaiser, 2008). As van Vugt and Ahuja (2011) put it, “our relatively primitive brains, which prime us for membership of fairly small, egalitarian tribes, find it tough to cope with the mammoth corporate and civic structures of the 21st century. Sure, we can be the conscientious employee in the faceless corporation and the dutiful citizen in the metropolis, but a surprisingly high proportion of us crave more intimacy in the way we interact with our co- workers, bosses and civic leaders. Because of this psychological mismatch, our brains are still wired to seek out leaders who display physical and behavioral traits that our ancestors would have prized on the savannah (which is why we like tall, strong-jawed leaders)”.
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