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).
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