Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Jennifer E Smith; Sergey Gavrilets; Monique Borgerhoff Mulder; Paul L Hooper; Claire El Mouden; Daniel Nettle; Christoph Hauert; Kim Hill; Susan Perry; Anne E Pusey; Mark van Vugt; Eric Alden Smith

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2015.09.013

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Trends Ecol Evol. 2016 Jan;31(1):54-66. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2015.09.013. Epub 2015 Nov 6.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, Mills College, Oakland, CA 94613, USA. Electronic address: jesmith@mills.edu.
² Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee, and National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
³ Department of Anthropology, and Center for Population Biology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
⁴ Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
⁵ Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.
⁶ Centre for Behavior and Evolution, and Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE2 4HH, UK.
⁷ Departments of Mathematics and Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
⁸ Institute for Human Origins, and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA.
⁹ Department of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
¹¹ Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK.
¹² Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, USA. Electronic address: easmith@uw.edu.

PMID: 26552515
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2015.09.013

Abstract

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and theoretical work on leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions. We categorize patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). We find that human leadership exhibits commonalities with and differences from the broader mammalian pattern, raising interesting theoretical and empirical issues.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Review

MeSH terms

Animals
Behavior, Animal
Biological Evolution
Conflict, Psychological
Humans
Leadership*
Mammals
Movement
Social Behavior*