Chapter 51
Evolution and Organizational Leadership

Nigel Nicholson

More ink has been spilled on leadership than any other topic in the business literature, and yet it seems that knowledge has failed to accumulate in a way that provides a unified consensus on what leadership is, what leaders do, why they emerge, what determines their success and failure, and what impacts they have (Bennis, 2007; Drath et al., 2008).

I shall argue that evolutionary theory has the capacity to provide the framework for such a unified view, though one that will require scholars to take a step back from their many articles of faith and sacred cows in this highly evocative and emotive field.

Why the field has this hyperactive character is itself a consequence of our evolved identity as a species, for any way you look at it, leadership is “special” for humans.

This is one of several key questions I shall seek to answer in this chapter, as follows:

• What is leadership? What relationship does human leadership have with equivalent functions elsewhere in the natural world? What does the history of our species teach us about the essence of leadership?
• What can we glean from the academic literature on leadership? What are the gaps that an evolutionary approach might fill? How can an evolutionary approach shed light on the key processes of leadership emergence, effectiveness, and failure?
• How is leadership changing? What are some key issues in contemporary contexts, such as gender issues and new models of leadership?

Let me start this chapter with what an evolutionary view of leadership connotes. It conceives of leadership as a set of functions that coordinate and direct the effort of conspecifics—other species members (van Vugt, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2008). It occurs in various forms among social mammals but among humans reaches an unparalleled level of refinement and diversity. Multilevel selection modeling is needed to explain these forms. That is, leadership serves the interests of those who would lead and those who would follow, and in so doing increases the fitness of the group. Group fitness is context dependent (Sober & Wilson, 1998). The forms that leadership takes—for example, shared versus top-down—are selected according to how adaptive they are for the constitution of the group (e.g., mature vs. dependent members), and the environmental challenges it faces (e.g., peace vs. war).

Scholars have searched for a genotype that encodes the qualities of willing and capable leaders, but with very limited success to date (Judge & Long, 2012). The reason is that selection in all its forms (natural, sexual, and kin) operates at the level of the phenotype, whose fitness-relevant qualities are defined by the ecology of the group and the wider context. Multilevel selection directs us to analyss interactive dynamics to understand the emergence, performance, and consequences of leadership in the human group.

Adaptive Systems and Leadership

Consider the simplest automaton, say a robot vacuum cleaner. It moves around, sucking as it goes, and changes direction when it encounters an obstacle or a cliff, programmed to move in systematic sweeps of whatever area it is placed within. The instructions are in-built along with sensors to detect bumps and cliffs, plus all the machinery necessary for locomotion and directional changes. Biological organisms are little different—such as simple photophobic bugs that walk into dark corners, eating whatever detritus they find on the way—directed by a comparator that tells them about the gap between current and target states of existence. Figure 51.1 shows the basic model of this adaptive system, input, and output elements, linked to create an adaptive system.

Figure 51.1 Adaptive Control Systems: The Basic Elements.

The routine that drives such a system has been characterized in psychology as the TOTE routine: Test-Operate-Test-Exit (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1980), where the organism seeks to reduce discrepancies between goals states and experienced states by testing for these gaps and executing behaviors to reduce them, until it can exit, that is, reach equilibrium and come to rest. The TOTE model was conceived as a way of characterizing purposeful systems, and it works well as a framework in an evolutionary context, where plans serve the goals of organisms. Figure 51.2 shows how this may be represented in the adaptive challenge facing individuals (2a) and indeed social groups (2b), both of which can be described in terms of an adaptive cycling between seeing (sensors), being (goals and capabilities), and doing (action repertoire and outputs).

Figure 51.2 (a) Individual and (b) Organizational Models.

Expanded analyses of this challenge have been developed elsewhere (Nicholson, 2011, 2013) to the effect that adaptation, especially for humans, is not solely a reactive process. When an entity—institution or individual—selects behaviors from its repertoire to meet the new demands of the altered situation, this may prove costly, impractical, or impossible. Two other adaptive strategies are possible. One is to abandon the over-demanding environment and seek a fresh context that has similar features to the environment as it was formerly so the familiar equilibrium can be recreated without behavior change—what has been called “habitat tracking” (Eldredge, 1995). A more radical adaptive strategy, one that is of growing interest to evolutionary theorists, is “niche construction” (Laland, Odling-Smee, & Feldman, 2001)—the active shaping of the environment to enhance the fitness relevance of a species' repertoire. Beavers, leaf-cutter ants, and chimpanzees and other social species all modify their local ecology the better to harvest its benefits; in the case of chimps, this has notable regional variation—what are in effect material subcultures that are adaptive to the local ecology (McGrue, 1992).

Humans have taken subculture niche construction to unprecedented levels of sophistication and variety, most profoundly in the “invention” of agriculture, and since then a proliferation of social and cultural forms have populated the globe. Multilevel selection theory shows how cultures evolve to mediate between human nature and environmental forces, each cultural niche resetting many of the criteria for the fitness of individuals, groups, and institutions (McElreath & Henrich, 2007). It is the central argument of this chapter that leaders are critical agents in these coevolutionary processes, especially the adaptive strategy of niche construction (Spisak, O'Brien, Nicholson, & van Vugt, 2015).

Leaders emerge and are successful to the degree to which they can fulfill what I have called “the Leadership Formula”—to be the right person, at the right time and place, doing the right thing (Nicholson, 2013). “Right,” of course, is an indeterminate value denoting what is adaptive to circumstances, which implies that there is no single right way of leading. Different types of leaders are selected to enact the behaviors that are required to meet the needs of local circumstances. This view triangulates situations, processes, and qualities (SPQ), connoting, respectively, leadership contexts (and how they are perceived), leadership strategies and behaviors, and leader attributes (including shared leadership). This simple framework has many ramifications and helps us to comprehend the variations we see in leadership in the natural world and across human history. The logic of the model is that there are six paths to adaptation, which I shall use to analyze the themes in the remainder of the chapter (as shown in Figure 51.3).

Figure 51.3 The Six Adaptive Paths.

The first path (path 1: shaping) underlies niche construction—leaders who by force of will and purpose shape the leadership situation and how it is perceived. The second path (path 2: discovery) is the process by which immersion in a situation exposes or awakens the latent qualities of a leader. The third path (path 3: instinct) is the determining force of dispositions—how the qualities of leaders, if unrestrained by self-control, translate into the exercise of their preferred behaviors, routines, and habits. Powerful leaders are often rewarded for exercising their instincts, that is, until they fail. Failure avoidance requires learning—insight into oneself (the discovery path, 2), but also the logic of adaptive responses to change, which lie in the remaining three paths. Leaders can grow and develop through experience, but only if they practice and embed novel routines and behaviors (path 4: development). The prerequisite for such discipline is awareness that the world has changed or that one has attained a new and deeper understanding of it (path 5: insight). This is the key to the holy grail of adaptive leadership, the recognition that new behaviors have to be selected and enacted to meet the demands of the situation as newly appraised (path 6: selection).

One final note to this model is to reemphasize that it is the perceived world that matters: what an organism's sense organs are attuned to (Powers, 1973). In the human case, this perceptual world is also a conceptual world. Leaders' adaptive strategies must encompass the realm of ideologies and beliefs, what some call socially constructed reality. To analyze these, we must first review more basic models.

Leadership in the Natural World

The concept of leadership only makes sense in relation to social systems (van Vugt et al., 2008). In the leadership literature definitions abound, but most center upon contemporary human purposes (e.g., influencing towards an outcome) (Northouse, 2012). I wish to avoid these presumptions by adopting a more naturalistic perspective. The evolutionary functional view says that leadership can take a variety of forms, from personal to impersonal, shared to singular. This treatment also allows a continuum of strategies from directive or controlling at one end to facilitative or coordinating at the other. Hence, a working definition to guide us will be that leadership is the direction or coordination of the members of a social group towards a goal.

The natural world contains many social species: insects, birds, some reptiles, and many mammals among them. The most intensely coordinated are the “eusocial” insect colonies—subservience of all to the colony, with rigid divisions of labor and sexual function and a high degree of genetic identity (more than 50% shared genes for offspring). The group acts, in effect, as a “superorganism” (Wilson, 1971). “Leadership” here resides in the encoded instincts the support collective action. The presence of a “queen” could hardly be called monarchical rule so much as a central entity around which automatized leadership functions revolve, to ensure she serves her allotted role in the reproductive fitness of the hive.

Birds and many ungulates have more solitary habits but flock and herd together for safety, shared food supply, and breeding. Without the imperative of genetic identity as in eusocial species, social organization is around family groupings (parents + offspring), commonly in haremic groups—dominant male plus females and their offspring. Leadership equates with parenting here, punctuated by contests among competing males for dominance and the breeding opportunities, but when the herd moves collectively, leadership is governed more by shared instincts than “leaders” (Gueron, Levin, & Rubenstein, 1996). Typically in social species, contests for superordinacy are based on physical fitness markers—large antlers, weighty tail feathers, fighting strength, and quality of song. Note that the first two of these are the classic “handicapping” markers of fitness—the burden to be carried by an individual for no other purpose than to mark his fitness to bear it (Zahavi, 1975).

More complex social organization is found in pack animals and higher mammals—dogs, marine mammals, and primates, where more complex status hierarchies allow dominance to be based on criteria other than physicality, such as ability to conciliate within the group, trust, and intelligence.

In humans, all these forms of coordination are visible. Those that have negligible recourse to the singular personification of a leader include:

• Impersonal coordination: People acting in parallel will spontaneously self-organize, such a queuing behavior.
• Crowd behavior: People will coact like herds at sporting events, in street protests, and in financial markets, where their behavior is motivated by imitation and observation of others.
• Coordinating mechanisms: Most of the time, people are not waiting for leaders to tell them what to do but are following routines, decision rules, and operating procedures (Tooby, Cosmides, & Price, 2006).

Self-organization: There are numerous circumstances under which humans (and other highly intelligent social mammals) will act together, informally sharing responsibility for directing their collective action, thought, and feeling, as in business organizations where self-managing teams operate (Purser & Cabaner, 1998). Leadership is thus a systemic function that can be shared (Pearce & Conger, 2003). However, this functional view is not what characterizes many writings on leadership, where more personalized and indeed “romantic” conceptions, often with heroic overtones, prevail (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985).

So persistent is this imagery that we must recognize that it is part of human nature to adopt personological conceptions. Even when we have recourse to “substitutes for leadership” (Kerr & Jermier, 1978), we seem to opt for forms where we are led by personal rather than impersonal processes (such as rules and procedures). It seems that this preference is rooted in the sense of purposive agency that accompanies human self-consciousness, an evolved capability that enables everyday “mind reading” and intersubjective awareness (Leary & Buttermore, 2003; Nicholson, 2011).

It seems that leadership is special and iconic for humans, and a source of many of the themes that have predominated, not just in the popular media but in the academic study of leadership, as we shall see.

The Lessons of History

A first observation to make is that human leadership has been highly instrumental at all the major junctures of cultural, economic, and social change. Leaders make a difference (Kaiser, Hogan & Craig, 2008), history also teaches us that leadership can take a vast array of very different forms.

The prototypical form that characterized our way of life for the first 95% of our history was that of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in a clan-dwelling existence. Contemporary anthropological and historical paleontological evidence suggests that the prevailing model of organization and leadership throughout this period exhibited a high degree of fluidity, a morphing process of continually adjusting social roles to cope with the flow of a mobile existence and variable environment (Boehm, 1999; Erdal & Whiten, 1996). Leadership in the hunter-gatherer world is a function that is passed from hand to hand according to local conditions and demands. Boehm's detailed study of tribal peoples reveals this model prevails where there is little or no nonperishable wealth—that is, where power and status through resources cannot be stored or transmitted, resulting in egalitarian, communal, and fluid power relationships. Tribal members deploy a variety of informal sanctions to prevent what Boehm calls “upstartism,” leaders who exceed the temporary and provisional basis of their authority.

Radical climate change created population pressure, which triggered the invention of agriculture and domestication of animals around 10,000 years ago, leading rapidly to organized settlements of relatively large fixed populations (Diamond, 1997). In this new world, for the first time wealth could be accumulated and social status transmitted between generations, leading to the accretion of power, kingship, slave states, and extreme forms of authoritarian leadership (Betzig, 1993; Padilla, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2007), along with a supporting range of designated positions of authority and servitude. This model coexisted alongside yet another model of governance adopted by tribes of semi-nomadic pastoralists, consisting of a social structure highly segregated by gender and rank, with ultimate authority in shared and consensual decision making among council elders. Comparative study of tribes suggests their leadership is governed by three principal situational challenges: decisions about where to hunt and camp, food sharing, and the control of aggressive males (Nicholson, 2005).

A predominant model in tribal societies has been that of the Big Man (van Vugt et al., 2008), whereby the best hunter or fisherman shares his surplus with his people in a way that is conspicuously self-denying, reserving a modest share for himself. In this way, the Big Man acts out the role of the chief servant to his people (Coon, 1979; Harris, 1979), demonstrating his ability to meet the needs in the situation, a patron trusted to acquire resources and distribute them fairly. The Big Man model seems to recur in a quite perverted form in the political leadership of many developing economies, where leaders oppose any kind of democratic opposition, accumulate vast wealth, and then distribute them selectively among followers in ways that ensure control, usually via the military, economic, and political institutions (van Vugt & Ahuja, 2010). The contingency that facilitates its success is the existence of a poor, uneducated follower group whose culture incorporates a historic faith in patronage, plus a clan mentality that incorporates a tradition of dependence on the largesse of chieftains.

Recent history—that is, the past few hundred years—has witnessed the development of what we might call a consensual model of leadership on the contingency of followers who have the education, resources, and power to restrain or remove the leader.

As we have noted, multilevel selection explains the coevolution of culture and leadership.

Leaders stand at the center of this coevolutionary logic as both the causes and effects of cultural change—potentially innovators through institution building, but also the products of cultural arrangements having been selected and socialized to fill specific purposes. Applying the control loop SPQ guiding this chapter helps us appraise this adaptive dynamic, to the effect that dictates the lessons of history are these:

• Leaders succeed until they fail! They have to be the right person, at the right place and time, doing the right things, that is, in an adaptive equilibrium of persons in leading roles who have the characteristics that enable them to deliver what circumstances demand. Leaders fail because their control cycle moves from congruence to incongruence, typically through failing to adapt to changing contexts (Hogan, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2010).
• There is no one right model of leadership. Different kinds of responses are needed to meet the demands of the times, and this generally causes different kinds of leaders to emerge to meet them. Van Vugt and Spisak (2008), for example, have noted how masculine and feminine leaders' attributes are favored, respectively, in times of war and peace.
• Leaders can succeed to the degree that they can dictate the circumstances to be congruent to their style, goals, and image—a variety of niche construction—which, of course, is possible to the degree that leaders can shape the social construction of their followers' reality (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Nicholson, 2013). But the lesson of history, especially of powerful despots such as Stalin and Hitler, is that social constructions may prove to be unsustainable if they deviate from followers' experienced reality (Lord & Maher, 1991).

Theories of Leadership: An Evolutionary Critique

We have reflected that the huge volume of research and publication around leadership is motivated by a search for formulaic solutions to our desire to stimulate the supply of leaders worthy of our regard. Much of the genre is in adulatory thrall of heroic life stories (Meindl et al., 1985).

An evolutionary overview of the literature enables us to see how its themes and foci have shifted to reflect and serve, in a coevolutionary loop (i.e. as both a cause and effect), the conditions and needs of the times. This is also resource-based, for leadership theory and research has mainly emanated from U.S.-based consultancies and business schools. The center of gravity for the field has been located close to the issues confronting the 20th-century American multidivisional corporation, rather than such as the family, not-for-profit, or governmental organizations, for models from other parts of world.

From Ancient to Modern Conceptions of Leadership

The classical political philosophers from Aristotle to Cicero were concerned with creating a rational-moral order through the institutions of the state, with leaders embodying moral rectitude commensurate with a virtuous state, conscious all the while of the fortitude required to master base impulses. The idea of leaders as exemplars of self-sacrificial nobility was overtaken in the Middle Ages by the ideas of Nicolai Machiavelli, who entertained a much less sanguine view of the realpolitik of leadership, though based upon an appraisal of the contextual challenge facing the leader.

The 20th century has witnessed the advent of individualism and “psychologism,” with a shift from the close identification of people with social roles toward recognizing that individual differences shape role performance. This saw the flowering of the field of personality psychology in an era of increased mobility and flexibility in social roles, where people are guided less by dutiful subservience to authority than the exercise of discretionary responsibility. This spawned a new literature seeking to identify the enduring, central, and common factors in “great” leaders. The search for the profile of the great man ultimately failed, as the lists of qualities lengthened and came to reflect more the values of cultural stereotypes than empirical predictors of leadership success (Northouse, 2012).

These predictive failures shifted attention back to the situation, with two key ideas. One was the recognition that leaders may have limited scope to act or determine outcomes—they may only make a difference when situational constraints are weak (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). The second was the idea that followers matter—in particular their willingness and ability to perform (Hollander, 1992). Early contingency theory tracked the relative importance leaders need to place upon goal achievement versus human relations at work (sometimes called task vs. consideration), a balance that depends upon the characteristics of followers and the leader's attributes (Fiedler, 1978; Hersey & Blanchard, 1969). These conceptions focused on the concept of leadership “style,” with the assumption that leaders should be able to respond adaptively to changing demands. An evolutionary approach would support the idea that people can alter their behaviors to meet changing demands, but note that it is more likely that different types of leaders will self-select and be selected for differing sets of circumstances—one of the “lessons of history.”

Trait approaches have become much more sophisticated with the revival of the field through enhanced measurement and more sophisticated predictive modeling. The consensus that emerged around the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality proved a major stimulus in leadership research (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002). Although the FFM was conceived and constructed entirely on empirical grounds, ex-post, evolutionary theorists have advanced plausible theoretical arguments for the fitness relevance of its categories (MacDonald, 1994).

This raises the question of why, if personality types have fitness relevance, there is variation at all. The answer, variously, has included frequency dependent selection (the comparative advantage of having a profile different to others) and the likelihood that personality is encoded in non-additive gene combinations, which may vary randomly or by association with other biological markers (Jang, Livesley, & Vernon, 2006; Nettle, 2006). Certainly, behavior genetics has shown us that although highly heritable, personality does not run in families (because it encoded via unique genetic combinations) (Lykken, McGue, Tellegen, & Bouchard, 1992). Research also shows that leadership emergence has a lower limit of 17% heritability, though this is more likely to be due to generalized drive for dominance and prominence than because there are specific universal leadership traits (De Neve, Mikhaylov, Dawes, Christakis, & Fowler, 2013; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Ilies, Gerhardt, & Lee, 2004).

Research does indicate that traits are distinctively implicated in leadership emergence and effectiveness, but not independent of context (Judge & Long, 2012). As we argue later, the universals of leadership are around trust and influence in relation to followers, whereas specific traits are invoked to a greater or lesser degree according to the condition of the followers and the challenges facing them. Perhaps closest to a universal trait on this reasoning is the desire to lead, which itself does seem to have a degree of heritability (Chan & Drasgow, 2001; Ilies et al., 2004).

Research focusing on the contingencies of style heralded a move into much more behavioral approaches to leadership, identifying suites of specific behaviors (Yukl, Gordon, & Taber, 2002). The coevolutionary driver underlying this emphasis is the growing professionalization of management, stimulated by a dearth of well-trained managers, and the rise of consultancies and business schools offering tool kits for would-be leaders.

Social exchange theory and the growing power of social psychology as a discipline moved the behavioral orientation of leadership research further into the microscopy of leader-follower interactions, via the advent of leader-member-exchange (LMX) research, which views the interactive process as an entity distinct from its participants yet under their control (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). The practice-based accompaniment to this has been the growth of the coaching movement—recognizing the levels of support leaders need to bear the increasing weight of role demands, parallel to the emphasis in the practitioner literature on the “leader as coach” (Ely et al., 2010).

Transformational Leadership and the Return of Charisma

Around the 1980s, the management literature divided into two strands. One was a return to the heroic conceptions of leadership, the other to a more sociological critique of the phenomenology of leadership. The first was initiated by an outsider to the management disciplines—James McGregor Burns (1978), a political scientist and presidential biographer who wrote a treatise on leadership that seemed to fire a starting pistol to reengage the heroic individualism of earlier “great man” conceptions of leadership, but this time in terms of it as transformative process. Burns, and the writers who pursued this line (Bass & Avolio, 1994; Hunt, 1999), contrasted transformational leadership, where leaders mobilize followers in a process of enhancement, engagement, and idealization that raises their aspirations and achievements to a higher level, with transactional leadership, the instrumental, task-focused direction of activity, based upon a calculative exchange of obligations for inducements. Again, one can smell the late 20th-century zeitgeist in these constructs. The construction of “transactional” leader is ambiguous—denigrating perhaps in its view of management (Hamel, 2008). Yet the model overall can be seen as an internal contingency model for corporate leadership, amounting to a recognition that in a corporate hierarchy the nature of “leadership” changes markedly by level (Katz & Kahn, 1978).

At the upper strata of organizations, where leaders exercise greater discretion, inducements are less material than around the alignment of values, the sharing of power, and the delivery of strategic goals. At lower levels, the psychological contract is less moral than an instrumental, and the required skills, personality, and goals of leaders are quite different—to do with error reduction, reward and control, and efficiency of execution (Etzioni, 1975).

In the same climate of visionary zeal, there was a resurgence of a more ancient and controversial topic “charisma.” It was the sociologist Max Weber who noted the hazardous nature of this “gift of the gods” in proposing that bureaucracy was a safer structural alternative to the capricious risks of personal leadership, where high-power models can prey on the weak and induce states of dependency. Charisma was rescued by psychologists and management scholars by inverting this dark conception of charisma to one where the visionary leader enhances the self-concept of followers—inspiring rather than disempowering them (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; House, 1977). At this point, scholars start to talk about transformational and charismatic leaders as interchangeable concepts (House, Shamir, 1993) and reify their existence through the traditional route of psychologists: psychometrics. Scales measuring these attributes have become probably the most common and attractive tools in the field, serving to validate and reinforce its persistence (Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1995).

It is worth taking a step back and viewing this again in cultural context. There is more than a whiff of what McAdams calls the persistent “redemptive” stream in American culture, from a born-anew frontier people seeking hope (McAdams, 2013), especially from leaders who will come to awaken and inspire followers to collective acts of transformation and renewal. One can discern the primitive yearnings housed in this romantic view, which bears the cultural imprint of the parental model (Keller, 1999). However, it is perhaps in recognition of a growing mistrust and disillusionment with leaders that has led to increasing attention to the “dark side” of charismatic leaders, such as their narcissism, disempowering relationships, and tendency to leave a successor vacuum in their wake (Padilla et al., 2007).

The most recent incarnations of leadership theory around the imagery and social construction of leadership have taken their lead from Meindl's critique of the “romance of leadership” (Meindl et al., 1985) in the form of what is called “implicit leadership theory” (Ayman & Korabik, 2010; Lord & Maher, 1991)—developing the idea that the projections of expectations onto leaders influence their emergence, selection, and evaluation. This is entirely consistent with our coevolutionary argument that leadership is conceptualized in ways that reflect people's needs—those that are proximate and locally enculturated drawing on the distal, deeper, and more timeless themes in the human story.

The Universal Leader—An Evolutionary Perspective

As van Vugt and colleagues point out (van Vugt et al., 2008), leadership exists to solve the adaptive challenges members of species have to face repeatedly. In the world of our primate cousins, as careful observers have noted, these involve a mix of brute force, coalitional politics, nurturance, and acts of reciprocation, in order to advance such goals as security of food supply, mating opportunities, child rearing, and conflict resolution (de Waal, 1989). Not much different than humans, really! Yet, if there are to be universal leadership qualities, then we need a closer specification. For van Vugt and Ahuja (2010) these are (a) finding resources, (b) conflict management, (c) warfare, (d) building alliances, (e) resource distribution, and (f) teaching.

Returning to our theme of adaptive leadership models, as we have seen over human history, the emphasis on these varies greatly. Thus, we devote many more resources today to teaching than to warfare, but the reverse was true not long ago in human history (Pinker, 2011). Our coevolutionary view is that these challenges as highly contingent. Drath and colleagues (2008) essayed one of the most comprehensive recent reviews of the field, concluding that the essential tasks of leadership can be resolved into three areas: direction, alignment, and commitment. This corresponds with the three points of our control model: situations-seeing-direction; qualities-being-alignment; and processes-doing-commitment.

Direction

Whether embodied in the person of a single designated leader, a committee, a team, or a set of operating rules, leadership has to achieve this most central of need: to make decisions about goals—what kind of strategic intent will satisfy the most important challenges facing the collective. As we observed earlier, this involves the duality of adapting responses to meet changed circumstances, or seeking to control and shape the circumstances (the roots of niche construction). Political history is replete with such cases, which are also visible in business. Notable examples include Henry Ford, who set the agenda for an entire industry, and more recently Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of the digital world for the industry and the market it inhabited. Both are clear examples of one person acting as the channel for coevolutionary processes that persist beyond their lifetimes. Although we can enumerate the talents we might look for in someone able to do these things, universal qualities to match them remain elusive.

It is easy to conceive of leadership scenarios where the leading group has relatively little need to set out vision, direction, or purpose, such as tribal groups who are servants of tradition, or are following the implacable ambient events, such as might be dicated by externalities such as the weather or hostile neighbors.

The other way to go in the search for universals is to specify the recurrent challenges faced by human groups, much as van Vugt and others have done, and then define what they require of leaders. However, niche construction and ecological change shift the balance of demands and responses required (Spisak et al., 2015). One element that continually recurs in the leadership literature is “vision,” but not clearly associated with any specific trait (House, Dorfman, Javidan, & Hanges, 2013).

In the adaptive framework offered here, the “vision” element is the critical role of the leader, or the leading group, in apprehending the environment, creating images of the challenges it confronts, and offering a strategic approach to dealing with them (Conger & Kanungo, 1988). It is conceivable, for example, that it could be concluded that someone different from the incumbent would be better equipped to deliver the strategy. The wise leader may even conclude this him- or herself.

The universal quality this invokes is therefore an adaptive shift in “seeing,” as the SPQ model characterizes it, which involves disseminating a construction of reality that promotes the people and processes that can mobilize the required responses. It is a prime function of leadership to see beyond the vision of others, gathering data from new or disregarded sources, challenging assumptions, and critically evaluating capabilities and delivery systems. Indeed many companies and their leaders fail because of deficiencies in “seeing”—unawareness of existing or nascent shifts in the environment—rather than deficiencies in “being” (core competences) or “doing” (capabilities).

Alignment

What is the identity of the “follower” group? What are their skills, capabilities, beliefs, values, strengths, and weaknesses? How are they organized? What cultural imperatives or technological constraints compel them to relate to each other in particular ways? Again, it requires a dialectical perspective that conceives of humans both as responsive adaptors and as proactive agents. There are clearly aspects of identity—both personal and organizational—that can be shaped to purpose, and others that are nonnegotiable biogenetic givens to be navigated or aligned. Evidence for the former comes from research in job design showing how incumbents shape the roles they are in and in the field of transitions where job shifters alter the roles they take (Nicholson, 2010). Sociologists have coined the term “structuration” to denote the agentic capacity of leaders and others in relation in the creation of institutional structures (Jarzabowski, 2008), and clearly “niche construction” is a tool of transformational leadership (Spisak et al., 2015).

At the level of personal identity, this can be seen as the leader's ability to navigate the traits of his or her personality and to construct a “style” that will work. In the leadership literature, this is treated either, on the one hand, as if style were a matter of choice, or on the other, as if leaders are the helpless victims of their traits. The truth lies between these extremes, in the domain of self-regulation (Karoly, 1993). This is the active construction agents put upon their own mental states and impulses, and how they conceive of the environment and its risks, awareness, and then exercise some degree of self-control over these elements and the actions that follow from them, often via personal narratives (Nicholson, 2011; Van Knippenberg, de Cremer, Hogg, & Van Knippenberg, 2005).

This is alignment at a personal level. For example, we know that certain physical attributes, such as height, are favored in the selective processes that advance leaders (Judge & Cable, 2004), yet many diminutive leaders override any selective disadvantage through their strong narratives, driven by their motivation to lead.

It is harder to alter one's personal identity than it is to change an institution's. Yet corporate identity change may be a central component of a firm's adaptive strategy, when it purchases new technologies, revises its structures, or merges with other entities. Leaders play a central role in such transformations (Kaiser et al., 2008).

However, organizational design is not always purely a matter of rational-economic choice; creating structures that are fit for purpose, that is, the configuration of environmental demands. The evolutionary perspective urges us to look deeper at whether humans have innately preferred ways of organizing, though, as discussed earlier, the human journey has traversed a great variety of social forms, each an experiment in how to align human effort to meet environmental challenges and pressures.

Three principles govern organizing: hierarchical stratification, grouping, and centralization. Hierarchy enables control from top to bottom, grouping promotes facilitates efficient division of labor, and centralization promotes integration. So far, so rational. But consider: Strong features of the human tool kit include dominance and reputational ranking (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001), which may lead organizations to be more hierarchical than they need to be to accomplish their work. Tribal instincts—human “groupishness” may subvert efficient divisions of into “clannish” self-serving networks within the compass of so-called Dunbar's number of 150. Leaders may also over-centralize organizations in their desire to build and secure their power base.

Commitment

The function of leaders to engage, mobilize, inspire, and influence followers, as we have seen, has dominated the literature, and the search for a universal skill set has largely failed, or at best produced long lists. The coevolutionary reasoning here suggests that almost any specific behavior—even inaction—may be an adaptive response to a given circumstance. Yet one can also reason that our species does have a common platform of psychological needs and interests, and that when in groups responding to a leader, exhibit common tendencies.

Following the logic of our argument, the first step in adaptive leadership is to apprehend what Mary Parker Follett, an early writer on management, called “The Law of the Situation” (Urwick, 1987). This involves both the skills of awareness—such behaviors as exploring, investigating, and questioning—and those of shaping reality, or challenging, defining, and building. Conversely, many leadership failures emanate from what has been called “bounded awareness” (Bazerman, 2014) coupled with a lack of courage to confront challenging truths. The recent emphasis on the need for emotional intelligence in leadership captures the need to have self-awareness and exercise self-control, in tandem with the need to read and manage the emotions of others (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2002). Leader-member exchange research also implicates the importance of interpersonal reciprocation in how leaders achieve impact (Graen & Uhl Bein, 1995). As we have noted, influencing behaviors, in one form or another, seem to be an indispensable part of the repertoire of leadership, whilst reminding ourselves that no methods of mobilizing followers are independent of the state of mind of the followers and other contingencies (Hollander, 1992; Tjosvold, Andrews, & Struthers, 1993). For people in a state of disorganization, acute need, or threat, leaders will mobilize using some combination of willpower, vision of future states, and self-conviction—what is called charisma in the literature. For leaders under conditions of social complexity, political diversity, and conceptual challenge, a more facilitative model of influence will be required.

The most persuasive universals in this domain are not trait based. This is perhaps the most startling conclusion of the vast multinational GLOBE project, led by Robert House (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman & Gupta, 2004). Rather, traits and styles are culture specific, whilst the universals include vision—seeing, as we have characterized it—and relational qualities, such as trust and integrity, reminding us that leadership is a social contract that engages the moral sensibilities that are present in all human communities (Brown & Trevino, 2006).

The Future of Leadership: An Evolutionary Perspective

The enormous and diverse literature offers a host of possible ideas for cultivating states of mind and competencies for leaders, plus a huge array of human resources management methods to measure, develop, and support leaders, their teams, and their decision making. Yet this ship is rudderless without some guiding goals. What kind of world are we seeking to choose and prepare leaders for? The options seem limitless, though two growing trends are the challenge of leading dispersed diverse and virtual global teams, and the challenge of integrating ever more complex technologies and processes. Much that used to need leaders is now automated. The improving education and capability of knowledge workers is shifting towards new models of leadership and away from traditional control functions. Leadership in many areas of the economy becomes more facilitative around innovation, intelligence, implementing strategy, connecting networks, and managing change, against a background of rising expectations, increased regulation, and public scrutiny. This makes leaders more accountable, pressured, and in need of support.

These trends hold three important implications for how we develop and resource leaders.

Shared Leadership

It is essential that the burden of leadership should not become so onerous as to demean and destroy those who might aspire to the role, or that its demands select out the people we most need to step up to the role. It is well to remember that how leadership roles are constructed is in our hands through institutional design. It is particularly pertinent that to manage the speed, complexity, and volatility of today's markets and technologies, more than one set of eyes, hands, and brains might be required, that is, for leadership to be less identified with the “lonely leader” model (O'Toole, Galbraith, & Lawler, 2002; Pearce & Conger, 2003). True shared leadership is rarely achieved overtly in formal paired leader roles, though informal sharing is a present feature of many leaders' partnerships with specific individuals, such as finance directors, COOs, and external trusted advisers (Hambrick & Cannella, 2004). These can be called “Critical Leader Relationships” (Nicholson, 2013).

In terms of the control model, the value of such partnerships is towards all three points of the model. Seeing: Leaders need insights beyond the charmed circle of acolytes and supporters that power always attracts, and for contrarian perspectives to the status quo to be entertained—especially important where adaptive demands are fast changing. Doing: To meet the demands of increased complexity and uncertainty, leaders need the advice and help of people with complementary skill sets. One pair of hands will not do. Being: Leaders need reflective disciplines, aided by constructive feedback and emotional support to navigate demands and expectations with confidence and courage (Alvarez & Svejenova, 2005).

For these relationships to flourish requires supportive structures and cultures that deemphasize intercolleague competition and an openness to the kinds of co-coaching practice that would enable these very substantial benefits to be realized (Nicholson, 2013). As we shall see in the next section, the feminization of leadership should help move in this direction.

Women in Leadership

Some feminists argue that gender biases in the social construction of leadership implicitly discriminate against women who might aspire to leadership roles. This seems at odds with scientific knowledge about sex differences in capability and preference (Buss, 1995; Geary, 1998); there is a case for saying that the multiplex world that is emerging in our times is highly amenable to the more collaborative egalitarian orientation of women. Such characterizations can be seen as stereotypical (Carli & Eagly, 2012), which raises the question about whether biological differences might underlie sex-typed attributions. It is also odd that such supervening power should be accorded to these beliefs, to the point of debarring women from leadership positions.

According to some writers, the effects are a deep and pervasive “gendering of the organization” through the infusion of discriminatory assumptions and expectations (Acker, 1990; Britton, 2000). But what if at root men and women have, for evolutionary reasons, preferences for different kinds of social order: men for agonic hierarchies where they can engage in competitive displays, and women for networks of inclusion and collaboration? The alternative reasoning here is that male dominance hierarchies, tournaments for dominance, feed the evolved need for reliable signals of fitness. Female exogamy (leaving the natal home to seek status through mating outside the family), on the other hand, favors the attributes such as interpersonal and collaborative skills that will enable a female to achieve and retain acceptance in a foreign clan (Ridley, 1993).

This would lead to an alternative explanation for the paucity of women in leadership roles, namely, that they do not like the games that have to be played in conventional hierarchical career progression and may be less skilled in playing them. An unpublished partial test strongly points in the direction of this hypothesis (Nicholson & Lee, 2014). The data show that the gendered organization does exist insofar as women strongly prefer to participate in, lead, and be led by women in decentralized nonhierarchical collaborative organizational designs, while men strongly prefer to join, lead, and be led by men in traditional hierarchies.

Such data suggest that the gendered organization exists as a structural phenomenon. The classic corporate hierarchy persists as a form preferred by men, rather than for its rational-economic benefits. That is, it satisfied needs and skills of the people who hold command over it, and who have prospered under it: dominant males. The scarcity of few women leaders is thus partly because the construction of leadership and paths to it are unattractive, unamenable, and unavailable to many women.

It is also part of our evolutionary heritage that the generally higher male desire to succeed in competitive environments—to provide enhanced reproductive fitness—means that men will endure more stress, risk, and degraded experience for the sake of getting ahead in hierarchies (G. F. Miller, 2000). This has the consequence that even in “feminized” environments, a disproportionate number of males are found in the more senior roles.

Can we be hopeful that there we can anticipate a causal sequence as follows? The business environment requires flatter, more collaborative structures to deliver innovation, service, and quality; these structures attract more women and advance them faster to positions of leadership because they possess the requisite skills. Possibly, but the evolutionary argument suggests that so long as leadership roles are highly rewarded positions, even the in the flattest structures, men will strive unequally for them, and indeed may be motivated to reproduce hierarchical forms where possible.

The Self-Regulated Leader

The implication of the analysis I have presented here points in two directions for the future development of leaders. The first is Follett's “Law of the Situation” (Urwick, 1987), and the idea that attention should shift from “being” to “seeing.” Rather than seeking and selecting “universal” leaders, we would do better to equip the men and women who would lead with the tools for visionary inquiry. These are those that take the leader beyond the charmed circles of local culture, power, informants, and stakeholders. The challenge of “being” that this arouses is how leaders can be helped to retune perceptions, beliefs, and intentions to meet the challenge of insight.

This then leads to the second strand for development, what in the literature is called self-regulation (Karoly, 1993). In much of the psychological literature, this is reduced to simple dichotomies of information processing, such as promotion and prevention focus (Higgins, 2002) and mood self-management (John & Gross, 2004), but the challenge is much wider, as William James first observed over a century ago (James, 1890/1950). He saw the self as an adaptive organ, with the supreme attribute of reflexive control. This is not the same as free will, though it feels very much like it, for alone among species we seem to have extraordinary powers of self-control, mediated by a consciousness of ourselves and of others as willed agents with the ability to control and plan future outcomes (Bandura, 2008).

Reflexive self-consciousness presents a profound challenge to evolutionary thought. Some have dismissed the self as epiphenomenal or a delusion (Dennett, 1995; Kurzban, 2010), though others recognize that complete accounts of human behavior are impossible without it (Leary & Buttermore, 2003; Nicholson, 2011). Autobiographical narratives are an important part of the leadership process and the niche construction. Evolutionary science does not have to be a detached bystander in the observation of leadership and its consequences. It can play an active role in helping us conceive of workable arrangements of power and response and provide us with new tools for insight into the kinds of institutions, management systems, and subcultures that can bring out the best in society and its members.

Rather than continuing the search for leadership laws and universals, which turn out to be locally bounded and driven by the covert needs of our primitive “romantic” yearnings, we can embrace more systemic and contextualized perspectives. As an adaptive function, leadership is prone to failure, often due to the idealized and stereotypical simplification attributions it attracts. The future of scholarship lies in understanding how this function operates differently according to the needs of time, place, and occupants and how we can ensure we reap the benefits by managing the adaptive capabilities of leaders and their institutions.

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