Riots

We have been this way before. Five hundred years ago a French social reformer by the name of Auguste Comte witnessed the same conditions that trouble us on the news today. The details were different then. Very different. But the conditions were the same.

There were no rampaging hordes of youth threatening to burn a global financial center to the ground. There were no reports of multiple suicide bombings taking the lives of scores of innocent victims. There were no airplanes to be flown into buildings filled with thousands of human beings. There were no Timothy McVeigh's or Anders Behring Breivik's going on one-man campaigns to save their world.

Some details certainly were the same. Back then there were a few individuals with lots of wealth that had been accumulated on the backs of the many who remained in poverty. They also had their slums and ghettos.

Auguste Comte felt the same way we feel today. Something was wrong with society. He could tell that society was in trouble. Sociology was his academic response to the malaise he saw around him. He had seen how science had been used to transform society physically. He hoped it could be used to transform it socially.

It must be obvious to us also that society is in trouble. By our reactions to these incidents we have declared that our society is sick. But the measures we have been proposing to correct these conditions suggest that we think otherwise. It is easy for us to blame the gangs who roamed the streets of London for these four nights in August and struck fear into the hearts of its citizenry. But this is nothing more than blame-shifting. That's a bit like blaming the river for the damage caused by the flood.

It is statistically possible for a freak storm to wreak much more damage than these young people caused. It is not the damage to life and property that offends us but the fact that it was caused by our children. We cannot understand how they could do this to our peace and quiet. I cannot help but think that they are asking a similar question. "How can they do this to us? How can they take away our chances at a good education, or a job to make a living? How can they do this to us?" Whether we admit it or not, their actions are their last ditch effort to change conditions they find to be oppressive. That is what Tim McVeigh thought he was doing. That is what Anders Breivik thought he was doing. It is not a sustainable solution to do to them the same thing they did to us, neither will it help future generations if we only kick the can a little further down the road.

We ask, "Where are the parents of these children?" Good question. But, maybe they have their own question. "Where were you when we were struggling to hold down two or three jobs so we could put food on the table for these children, and have enough money left over so I could buy for them all those glamorous consumer goods the media keeps telling them they must have? Where were you then?"

We advise our children to stay away from gangs as if gangs are an alien species? These gangs are all homegrown. They did not spring up out of nothing. They did not invade our societies from outer space. We produced these gangs. We created the circumstances in which they sprout and flourish.

We have been this way before. Comte recognized that it was a problem with collective action. He recognized that was he observed among the poor of society did not only define them; it defined the entire society. The gangs are not sick. All the groups and individuals that strike fear into our hearts are not sick. We are sick. The problem is collective action. Leadership is nature's response to the need for collective action. This is what we need today. We need leadership that will correctly identify the problem we have, and then be capable and bold enough to suggest the type of corrective action that will make these recent events nonessential. If we fail to rise to the occasion we will be this way again.

Complexities

What is it that makes a good leader? Is a good leader the same thing as being a successful leader? Is there anything as a bad leader? How many times and under what circumstances is a leader allowed to fail before he can be called a failure? Those are not easy questions because we are dealing with a concept that has correctly been called “the most complex and multifaceted phenomenon to which organizational and psychological research has been applied,” (van Seters and Field, (1990). However, these are important questions for those of us living in the twenty-first century because leadership will become more and more important as society becomes more and more complex.

Our interest in leadership began by focusing on individual in world history (mostly men) whom we considered to be great. Drawing on the lives of individuals like Muhammad, Shakespeare, Luther, Rousseau, and Napoleon, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1888) thought that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He was joined in that view by American scholar Frederick Adams Woods (1913) whose book, The Influence of Monarchs: Steps in a New Science of History, examined 386 rulers from the 12th century till the French revolution in the late 18th century and the influence of their lives on historic events. These and other Great Man views of history were later incorporated into what has been called the Personality Era of leadership theories. They have also had an inordinate influence on our contemporary understanding of leadership itself.

It is important to note that the Personality Era in our evolution of leadership theories does not begin with the leadership histories of the great men whose lives are the focus of that era. These great men were not aware of the leadership theory with which they have been affiliated. Circumstances had prevailed upon them and they heeded the call to leadership. They were not proponents of any theory of leadership.

Neither were the historians and thinkers like Bowden (1927) and Galton (1869) who would, years later, examine their lives and their work. It is interesting that the origins of the Personality Era of leadership theory do not coincide with the period with which that theory is identified. Proponents of the academic theory did not study the conditions under which those leaders became leaders. They did not study the lives of other individuals in that period that did not go on to be leaders or why those great men did become great. They may have given more credence to the views of Spencer (The Study of Sociology, 1896) who countered Carlyle by suggesting the emergence of a great man on the stage of history “depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”

It did not take long for other academics to recognize that personality was not a sufficient explanation for the leadership prowess of these great men. If leadership was related to personality one would expect that notable leaders would have similar personalities. However, it was obvious from the lives of contemporary leaders that successful leadership is associated with a range of differing personality types. There was also a problem for practicing managers because it is extremely difficult to imitate the personality of another individual. It was necessary to sever the link between leadership and particular individuals. A new theory was proposed which focused on identifying a number of traits that one could adopt to enhance leadership skills.

As before, no effort was made to formally define leadership for research purposes. From that point onwards leadership theories have been focused on leadership styles rather than on leadership. The purpose has not been to improve leadership but to improve leadership styles. Unfortunately, many have conflated the two and have tended to confuse leadership style with leadership.

Psychological Biases

Modern human leadership is related to our ability to organize and is based on psychological biases that were acquired almost 2.5 million years ago (van Vugt, 2008). Out of those early evolutionary pressures emerged a form of leadership that anthropologists believe can be observed among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert and the Yanomamo of the Amazon. It bears little or no resemblance to the forms of leadership studied by those being prepared for leadership in today’s world.

The differences between the egalitarian leadership style practiced by our early ancestors and the dominance hierarchies that form the basis of our current leadership model is striking. The personality and trait driven leadership models on which our current leadership models are based do not represent a natural evolution from that early model of natural leadership.

Much is made of the fact that humans are a social species but we often forget that our first permanent groups were our families. It is from these family groups that we developed our leadership psychology and the egalitarian leadership style it produced.

We must have acquired those psychological biases much closer to the beginning of the first phase of human development and we have maintained this stable and successful form of leadership for the past 2.5 million years.

Van Vugt’s account of how we developed the conditions that gave rise to our current dominance hierarchies is instructive. The development of agriculture was a natural facet of our evolutionary development, but the authoritarian leadership style that emanated was not inevitable.

If our psychological biases produced an egalitarian form of leadership, it stands to reason that our social psychology must have also been egalitarian. We must have been pre-disposed to consider any surpluses accumulated by the community as the property of the community, rather than the property of the one who happened to be in charge at the moment.

Use of communal property to create cultural elites was an unfortunate turn of events. But the evolution of our leadership styles to the quasi-egalitarian Transformational Era is an indication that the evolutionary processes that gave rise to our first and lasting form of leadership have not been successfully overcome.

The answer is not to abandon all vestiges of individual ownership and return to communal ownership. The genie is already out of the bottle.

If we desire to make the transition to the form of global leadership that nature prescribes we must find a way to bridge the gap between the two.

The effects go beyond our formal organizations. In a weird twist of fate family life is now infested with the same authoritarian approach to leadership. We have turned back on ourselves. An egalitarian family structure produced reinforced psychological biases that gave rise to egalitarian organizational structures. Now, our formalized and authoritarian leadership styles have produced the same approaches in the family unit.

At the same time that we continue to improve our current forms of leadership in our business, social and cultural organizations we must find the common thread between our current leadership style and the leadership that was practiced by our ancestors. That will be the subject of the next blog.

Perspectives

(Last time we looked at two excerpts from New Scientist magazine that documented the failure of our leadership efforts and gave a short overview of the history of leadership in human development.)

Van Vugt’s article has introduced into the discussion a perspective that has been missing from our academic debate of leadership. Van Seters and Field’s nine eras reflect how we tend to think of the way that the human leadership process evolved. In that model, leadership began with the kind of leadership described in the one-dimensional and authoritarian Personality Era and gradually evolved into the more egalitarian and collaborative Transformational Era.

It is only the latter part of the van Seters’ evolutionary tree that is prescriptive. The leaders whose leadership style is represented in the Personality Era did not have a leadership theory to follow nor did they set out to create something new. They responded to a need that arose before them and they had the personality to satisfy that need. The different theories shown in van Seters’ tree are really academic efforts to explain why early leaders were successful and those explanations were used in the training of contemporary leaders.

Van Vugt’s work enables us to attach a timeline to van Seters’ evolutionary tree. Van Seters' evolutionary tree corresponds to all of the final phase of leadership in van Vugt’s model and extends into that period in van Vugt’s second phase where chiefs, kings and warlords emerged. It does not cover the extended period of the first phase and a major portion of the second phase. Viewed in isolation the nine eras of leadership theories appear to be an evolutionary process of continued improvement and development. This is the approach that leadership theorists have, no doubt, taken. Van Vugt’s model requires a revision of that view. The evolutionary tree is only a small part of a much longer cycle and it marks a period during which humanity has been striving to regain a model of leadership it once had and for which its psychology is adapted.

Those two views require two approaches because they are moving in different conceptual directions. The contemporary view of leadership views leadership as a work in progress. It is analogous to the invention of the automobile. Each new model works fine but it suits the prevailing conditions better and incorporates new technologies that were not available before. The view I am proposing views leadership as a work to be restored to its natural state. To maintain the analogy, leadership is viewed as an automobile with obvious mechanical difficulty. It works, but not efficiently. Van Seters’ evolutionary tree reflects our years of tinkering with the engine. How close we are to the original condition we will never know until we find the original blueprint.

Van Seters and Field posit that with the Transformational Era we may have arrived at a more definitive concept of leadership. This was the end of an evolutionary developmental process in which “each new era evolved after a realization that the existing era of understanding was inadequate to explain the leadership phenomenon, and poorly adapted to serve useful practical application.” We are now ready, they believe, to enter into the Tenth Era which they call the Integrative Era.

What is required is a conceptual integrating framework which ties the different approaches together, and makes possible the development of a comprehensive, sustaining theory of leadership. It must be realized that leadership effectiveness can be determined not from any one approach alone, but rather through the simultaneous interaction of many types of variables. Until we have the framework it will not be possible to understand the result. We need “thick” theorising [sic] which treats leadership more as it should be treated: a complex cognitive and political enterprise (Clark, 1984).

Solutions

Everything I want to say about leadership is in these excerpts from an article written in 2008 and published in New Scientist magazine. Now, ‘contain’ may not be the correct word because the author , Mark van Vugt, does not say exactly what I would like to say. I disagree with some of the ideas he expresses in the article and I am also certain that he did not intend his words to be interpreted the way I will. But those excerpts do point us in the direction of everything I think we need to consider if we are serious about gaining the greatest benefits from our exercise of leadership. The first excerpt comes from the end of the article. The second excerpt is intended as background for discussing how our ancestors developed the psychological bases for leadership.

There are major differences between modern leadership roles and the kind of leadership for which our psychology is adapted, and this mismatch can be problematic. For a start, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have deferred to different leaders depending on the nature of the problem at hand. Yet today a single individual is often responsible for managing all aspects of an enterprise. Few leaders have the range of skills required, which may account for the high failure rate of senior managers – in corporate America it runs at 50 per cent ( Review of General Psychology, vol 9, p 169 ). Surveys routinely show that between 60 and 70 per cent of employees find the most stressful part of their job is dealing with their immediate boss. This may be partly because ancestral leaders only acquired power with the approval of followers, whereas in modern organisations leaders are usually appointed by and accountable to their superiors, while subordinates are rarely allowed to sanction their bosses. What’s more, our psychology equips us to thrive in smallish groups of closely related individuals, which may explain why many people feel indifferent to large organisations and their leaders. Finally, in ancestral societies there would have been minimal differences in status between leaders and followers. In the US, average salaries for CEOs are 179 times those of their workers.

The following excerpt does more than just briefly detail the history of leadership among humans. I will highlight the significant points in a subsequent blog:

The animal evidence supports the idea that adaptations for leadership and followership tend to evolve in social species. In humans, they were probably further shaped by our unique evolutionary history. There were three distinct stages in human development where the nature of leadership altered to reflect cultural and social changes ( American Psychologist, vol 63, p 182 ).

The first and by far the longest phase extended from the emergence of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, until the end of the last ice age about 13,000 years ago. Natural selection for certain successful strategies of leadership and followership during this long era is likely to have shaped the distinctly human leadership psychology we still have to this day. Throughout this time, our ancestors probably lived in semi-nomadic,hunter-gatherer bands of between 50 and 150 mostly related individuals. Their lifestyle is widely thought to have resembled that of today’s hunter-gatherer societies such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert and the Amazonian Yanomamo. These groups are fundamentally egalitarian, with no formal leader. Although there are “Big Men” – the best hunters and warriors or wisest elders, for example – the influence of each is limited to their areas of expertise and, crucially, it is only granted with the approval of followers. This suggests that collaboration among subordinates allowed early humans to move beyond the dominance hierarchies found in other primates, towards a much flatter prestige-based hierarchy with a more democratic style of leadership.

With the development of agriculture some 13,000 years ago, groups settled, populations grew rapidly and, for the first time in human history, communities accumulated surplus resources. They needed leaders to redistribute this surplus and to deal with increasing conflict both within and between groups. The power of leaders grew accordingly, and with it the potential to abuse this power. Leaders could now siphon off resources and use them to create cultural elites, while disgruntled followers were less free to move away from exploitative rulers. The result of such changes was a more formalised, authoritarian leadership style and the emergence of the first chiefs and kings, as well as warlords bent on extracting resources through force.

The industrial revolution, some 250 years ago, paved the way for the final phase of leadership – the one to which academic discussions of leadership, which tend to focus on business and politics, almost exclusively refer. At the beginning of this era followers were little more than slaves, but as citizens and employees acquired more freedom to defect from overbearing leaders, the balance of power shifted away from authoritarian leaders and back to something more like the egalitarian approach of ancestral times.

Transitions

(In the last blog we reviewed the origins of leadership theory and discussed how our views on the nature of leadership are influenced by the conditions surrounding those origins. In this blog we will review the evolution of our ideas on leadership).

Van Seters and Field (1990) (1) have identified nine leadership eras beginning with the Personality Era all the way to the current Transformational Era. Each of these eras contains two or more periods of theory development.

1. Personality Era: Great Man Period; Trait Period
This Era equated leadership with personality and marked a beginning in the understanding of the leadership process.
2. Influence Era: Power Relations Period; Persuasion Period
This Era built on the last by recognizing that leadership did not only depend on the personality of the leader but involved a relationship between the leader and the followers.
3. Behavior Era: Early Behavior Period; Late Behavior Period; Operant Period
Similar to the Trait Period in the Personality Era, this Era emphasized the Behavior traits of leaders.
4. Situation Era: Environment Period; Social Status Period; Socio-technical Period
This era recognized that leadership did not only involve leader and follows but was influenced by the situation and circumstances.
5. Contingency Era
This was something of an hybrid era. It was recognized that leadership was not unidimensional as was theorized in the previous eras but was contingent on one or more of the emphases in the previous eras.
6. Transactional Era: Exchange Period; Role Development Period
In this era it was suggested that leadership did not only reside in the person or the situation but was influenced by role differentiation and social interaction.
7. Anti-Leadership Era: Ambiguity Period; Substitute Period
This era was a reaction to the apparent failure of the current leadership paradigm. Studies to test the extant theories were inconclusive. Some concluded that there was no articulable concept called leadership.
8. Culture Era
We recovered from the cynicism of the Anti-Leadership area with the idea that leadership is not just a phenomenon of the leader or of the group but is omnipotent in the entire organization.
9. Transformational Era: Charisma Period; Self-fulfilling Prophecy Period.
This is the current approach to leadership in which the leader attempts to “transform those who see the vision, and give them a new and stronger sense of purpose and meaning.”

Van Seters and Field go into great detail showing how each period differed in its focus from others that came before it. Three types of changes are obvious from their analysis.

Generally, new eras evolved as practitioners realized that the existing theories of leadership were “inadequate to explain the leadership phenomenon, and poorly adapted to serve useful practical application.” For example, the transition within the Personality Era from the Great Man Period to the Trait Period occurred because it became apparent that many effective leaders had widely differing personalities. More importantly, it is extremely difficult to imitate an individual’s personality. The Trait Period focused on a number of traits that one could develop to enhance leadership and potential. It also fell into disuse because, in addition to the fact that most traits cannot be learned, studies could not identify one single trait or group of characteristics associated with good leadership. This is the first type of transition: an improvement of an old theory because of new information.

At times new eras took the field in a completely new direction. This is what happened with the transition from the Influence Era to the Behavior Era. The Influence Era had improved on the previous Personality Era, but the Behavior Era emphasized what leaders do instead of their traits or sources of power. This is the second type of transition in which the theorist adds an entirely new perspective to the field. The new theory may be able to coexist with the other.

Finally, sometimes old theories were revisited given the benefit of new advances in the field, as with the rise of the Transactional Era. Whereas the Contingency Era suggested that effective leadership was contingent on one or more of the pure, unidimensional forms of the first four eras, the Transactional Era suggested that “leadership resided not only in the person or the situation, but also and rather more in role differentiation and social interaction.” The Transactional Era can also be viewed as the Influence Era revisited because “it addresses the influence between the leader and subordinate.”

1. Van Seters, D. A. and Field, R. H. G. (1990). “The Evolution of Leadership Theory.” Journal of Occupational Change Management. Vol. 3 Iss: 3, pp.29 – 45. < http://apps.business.ualberta.ca/rfield/papers/evolution.PDF >