The modern work environment has provided many benefits to humans in recent history. Our better health, greater wealth, and superior technology are all products of intensification and diversification of labor that started several millennia ago and which culminated in the creation of large-scale corporate structures after the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, the modern organizational structures that we live and work in have also produced many social problems such as stress and alienation among employees, inequalities in access to wealth and health care, crime and overpopulation, and threats to global environmental sustainability.
Evolutionary leadership theory argues that this discrepancy between modern and ancestral organizational environments is the result of an evolutionary mismatch. All organisms, animals and plants, possess physical and behavioral traits that have been passed down through generations, preserved by natural selection because of their adaptive function in a given environment. However, over time environments change, and so all organisms face the risk of finding themselves perfectly equipped to deal with challenges that may no longer exist, and ill-equipped to deal with a host of new challenges. Traits that were at one time adaptive can be “mismatched” to the environment in which the organism currently resides. Because evolution through natural selection is a slow, cumulative process, mismatches are particularly likely if environments undergo rapid change.
Such is the case for humans. The environment that most of us live in is very different from the environment that our ancestors lived in only some 13,000 years ago, before the advent of agriculture. From 2.5 million years ago—when the first hominids appeared in Africa—until the agricultural revolution, humans lived in relatively small nomadic band societies of around 150 individuals, leading a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Further, fossil evidence indicates that human brain size has remained remarkably stable for at least the last 200,000 years. This leads some evolutionary psychologists to conclude that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” with the potential for significant mismatches.
One mismatch example is the widespread availability of sweet and fatty foods in modern society. Human bodies evolved to respond to the taste of fat and sugar by feeling immense pleasure. Our ancestors evolved to quickly devour all available sweet or fatty foods because such foods were perpetually scarce and perishable in an ancestral world. Yet, now that these foods are widely and cheaply available in supermarkets, our evolved tendencies to take in calories produce all sorts of health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems. Needless to say, modern environments do not only pose mismatches for humans but for many other species too. Many of the environmental changes caused by human intervention such as overfishing, deforestation, and climate change create new selective environments, which many species are not adapted for.
Thus, the discrepancy between modern and ancestral environments potentially creates mismatches between aspects of human evolved psychology and the challenges of modern society. This may well be the underlying cause of a wide range of problems causing failures in leadership and organizational management. Mismatches can pertain to both the selection of leaders and their functioning and effectiveness in modern organizations. Consider the selection of leadership in modern organizations. This is often a top-down process in which managers at a lower level are appointed by managers at levels higher up in the hierarchy. Or individuals are “flown in” from outside the organization to be appointed as managers. The selection process for leaders consists of an assessment of an individual candidate’s personality, skills, and competencies based on some formalized tests, their resume, and an interview, usually with individuals higher up the hierarchy rather than with the subordinates whom they may lead.
This is very much at odds with leadership emergence in ancestral human groups. Extrapolating from the anthropological evidence of past and present hunter-gather societies such as the Kung San in Southern Africa, the Haclza in Tanzania, and the Ache in Paraguay, we have a fairly good idea of what leadership may have looked like in the environment in which humans evolved. Such bands do not have formalized leadership. Instead, there are individuals of influence who emerge as leaders when they embark on some specialized activity such as hunting, making weapons, defending the group, or preparing a new campsite for which they have some specialized expertise and need to recruit other individuals to cooperate. These individuals have no overall authority over the group, rather they exercise influence in narrowly defined areas of expertise and only through persuasion are they able to emerge as leaders in a temporary group activity. With the next activity leadership selection begins again.
This bottom-up approach selects for leaders with certain characteristics that are universally valued. Universally positive leader characteristics—which are also prominent in hunter-gatherer groups— include such qualities as integrity, persistence, humility, competence, decisiveness, and vision. It is noteworthy that so-called “derailed” executives—bright, ambitious, and talented managers who nonetheless fail—are often described as lacking these traits. Their selection may be due primarily to their ability to please their superiors. In modern industrial and bureaucratic organizations, however, leaders are accountable to, and often appointed by, managers senior to them in the organizational hierarchy, and subordinates have little power to sanction their bosses. Modern organizational ethnographers report that most managers implicitly understand that pleasing superiors is more important to career success than pleasing subordinates.
The scale and complexity of leadership also provides the potential for a mismatch. The small hunter-gatherer band societies of our ancestral past were essentially extended families: Members knew each other, understood their interdependencies, and had a genetic investment in one another’s fate. These groups were held together by kinship and norms of fairness and reciprocity, which require that individuals can depend on each other for assistance and will return in kind. There was room for particularly charismatic individuals to emerge as leaders. Charismatic leadership works in part by influencing followers to identify with a collective enterprise and internalize group aspirations. Charismatic leaders change the way followers see themselves—from self-interested individuals to members of a cohesive group—through emphasizing the similarity and shared fate among group members as if they are kin. However, charismatic leadership is an exception in the modern world. In traditional societies the Big Men leaders are often extremely charismatic. Being inspiring, persuasive, and visionary are important attributes of aspiring leaders in small face-to-face groups. In modern organizations it is extremely hard to get the same levels of intimacy between leaders and followers. Yet even in large bureaucratic organizations we still prefer leaders to adopt an inspirational and personalized leadership style, and such leaders tend to be more effective.
In past environments humans knew their leaders personally and there was no distinction between people’s private and public lives. As a consequence, our minds may have difficulties separating the role of the leader from the person occupying this role in modern organizations. In the past, information about people’s personality and their personal norms, values, and ambitions were critical in determining whether they should get the chance to lead the group because this was the only information available. In the modern world we crave this information but we do not often get it. We are quite aware that, for instance, middle-level managers have only limited influence because they are following orders of senior management. Because our psychological machinery is not very well adapted to these complex, multilayer hierarchies, we hold them personally accountable for any decisions that are harmful to our interests (“My boss is a nasty person”). Making trait inferences about leaders is called the “leader attribution error”, and it might well be another aspect of our evolved leadership psychology, resembling a possible mismatch.
Finally, leadership in the ancestral environment was fluid, distributed, and situational. The individual most qualified for the task at hand had the greatest influence on collective actions. Rarely would one individual coordinate all group activity and make all group decisions. However, with modern bureaucracies and formal leadership roles, one individual—the “leader”—is responsible for managing all these functions. Leader versatility—the ability to perform multiple, even competing, roles—is increasingly associated with leadership effectiveness, but few leaders have the range of skills needed to perform such a wide array of duties. This may contribute to the high failure rate of senior managers. Modern societies attribute enormous importance to leadership and often hold leaders personally responsible for organizational success or failure even if this is not always warranted or fair. Thus, the so-called “romance of leadership” may well be a vestige of our ancestral past.
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