Dominic Johnson

We often think of “leadership” as a uniquely human trait, conjuring up images of historical giants such as Gandhi or Churchill, as well as infamous ones like Hitler or Stalin. Current events also anchor discussions of leadership to human affairs from the war in Iraq, the election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the banks, to our everyday experience of great bosses or the trials and tribulations of leading others in our workplace. Whether it is done well or badly, political, military, religious and economic leadership dramatically impacts all of our lives.

However, have you ever wondered where our propensities for leadership (and followership) came from? If we step back from our own world of human affairs, we quickly notice leadership and followership in action throughout the animal kingdom. Over the summer months, you may have seen bees following leads to productive flowers, trails of ants forming organized highways from your picnic table into the bushes, and now flocks of birds wheeling across the October skies in their seasonal migration. These are not random or chance movements and gatherings. Each is an example of adaptations for leadership and followership that are crucial to survival.

In a new paper with biologist Andrew King and psychologist Mark Van Vugt (“The Origins and Evolution of Leadership”, Current Biology, October 2009), we examined aspects of leadership and followership that we share in common with other animals. Even humans, it turns out, are subject to some of the same underlying phenomena of mass movement that apply to fish and birds. But our cross-species approach also allowed us to distinguish what is unique about human leadership and followership-big brains change the game-but this difference is where an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful.

Our modern social and physical environment is of course very different to that in which we evolved. But if we understand both the “ultimate” functions of leadership and followership behavior (what is it for? who benefits? who pays the costs?), and the “proximate” psychological mechanisms that cause them, then we can identify areas of “mismatch” where our evolved mechanisms are likely to clash with evolutionarily novel stimuli (the modern world). For example, positions of leadership today are still correlated with age, sex, height, and weight—over and above differences in competence and effectiveness. Are big old male bosses really better than average? Or could this be some sort of hangover from our evolutionary past?

An evolutionary approach to leadership offers a scientific framework that offers new ways to understand, predict and improve leadership and followership—human traits that did not emerge out of thin air, but which we share with countless other species and have been shaped by natural selection for hundreds of millions of years.

See Current Biology webpage

Conference on evolutionary approaches to leadership at London Business School, 14 January 2010

My other work on leadership:

Book chapter “The Mismatch Hypothesis”, with Mark Van Vugt, Robert Kaiser and Rick O’Gorman

Book “Overconfidence and War”