The evolution of leadership: Leadership and followership as a solution to the problem of creating and executing successful coordination and cooperation enterprises

摘要

This paper proposes that leadership and followership are not just evolved solutions to the problem of coordinating what to do once a group exists. Rather, leadership and followership also solve the problem of creating a group in the first place. Creating a group is a problem of meta-coordination: coordinating with others about what to coordinate about. Of all possible bases for coordinating or cooperating, only a tiny fraction will be embraced by others, and smaller fraction still will be successfully implemented and executed. No one individual has enough information to solve this problem on one's own. Leadership and followership solve this problem by creating a social marketplace, in which leaders propose possible coordination and cooperation enterprises, and followers evaluate and choose among these offered possibilities. This marketplace-in which different individuals propose and evaluate different coordination and cooperation enterprises-solves the problem of meta-coordination by exposing possible enterprises to the broader social market, which serves as a selective or culling regime. Leadership and followership are evolved information-processing roles within this social marketplace. Consequently, understanding the evolutionary psychology of leadership and followership requires understanding the challenges and opportunities inherent in this market dynamic. The present paper analyzes the tasks that must be carried out to successfully navigate this dynamic. This task analysis predicts a number of novel information-processing functions for the roles of leadership and followership, and suggests that leadership and followership are a broader set of phenomena than currently conceptualized. This broadened conceptualization has a number of important implications for future research, and suggests that leadership and followership may have played a more central role in the evolution of human coordination and cooperation than has been appreciated.