Leadership Research Summary:
• Evolutionary perspectives are part of any comprehensive explanation of leadership and, more generally, hierarchy formation in groups. This editorial describes contributions to a special issue on the theme of “The evolution and biology of leadership: A new synthesis”, and in which researchers reach four main conclusions:
o First, leadership has been a powerful force in the biological and cultural evolution of human sociality. Humans have evolved a range of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms (adaptations) that facilitate leader-follower relations, including safeguards against overly dominant leaders.
o Second, how these adaptations interact with local ecological and cultural contexts produces cultural variation in leadership preferences, and in the structure of human organizations more broadly.
o Third, an evolutionary perspective creates consilience between the social and natural sciences, by integrating leadership theory from diverse fields such as biology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, and political science.
o Fourth, evolutionary approaches – and specifically the collection of articles in this theme issue – produce and test novel hypotheses, such as regards:
(i) the critical role of leadership in cooperation
(ii) the importance of contextual factors in leader emergence and effectiveness
(iii) interactions between genetic and cultural influences on leadership
(iv) obstacles and opportunities for women leaders.
Leadership Research Implications & Conclusions:
• In sum, an evolutionary approach provides a new set of theories, methodologies and tools to understand leadership and followership more completely, help overcome biases and blind-spots in the literature, and turn our attention to investigate novel leadership trends and phenomena.
• Adopting an evolutionary perspective has rich implications for public policy, particularly for thinking about how we culturally design our organizations and institutions to avoid exploitative leadership and create healthy, productive leader-follower relationships.