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Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff
Jennifer E Smith1, Sergey Gavrilets2, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder3
1Department of Biology, Mills College, Oakland, CA 94613, USA.
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
|November 11, 2015
Summary
This review synthesizes biological and social science views on leadership from an evolutionary perspective. Human leadership shares commonalities with, yet differs from, broader mammalian patterns, prompting further research.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary biology
- Social sciences
- Comparative psychology
Background:
- Leadership is a key research area across biological and social sciences.
- Understanding leadership requires integrating diverse perspectives.
Purpose of the Study:
- To provide a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social science views on leadership.
- To examine leadership patterns in small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies from an evolutionary viewpoint.
Main Methods:
- Review of empirical and theoretical work on leadership.
- Analysis across four key domains: movement, food acquisition, conflict mediation, and intergroup interactions.
- Categorization of leadership variation across five dimensions: distribution, emergence, power, payoff, and generality.
Main Results:
- Identified commonalities and differences between human and non-human mammalian leadership patterns.
- Characterized leadership variation across specified dimensions.
Conclusions:
- Human leadership aligns with broader mammalian patterns in some aspects but diverges in others.
- Findings highlight areas for future theoretical and empirical investigation in leadership studies.
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