Brian R. Spisak

Sex Differences in the Emergence of Leadership During Competitions Within and Between Groups

This experiment investigated potential gender biases in the emergence of leadership in groups. Teams played a public-goods game under conditions of intra- or intergroup competition. We predicted and found a strong preference for female leaders during intragroup competition and male leaders during intergroup competition. Furthermore, during intragroup competition, a female leader was more instrumental than a male leader in raising group investments, but this pattern was reversed during intergroup competition. These findings suggest that particular group threats elicit specific gender-biased leader prototypes. We speculate about the evolutionary and cultural origins of these sex differences in the emergence of leadership.

Warriors and peacekeepers: testing a biosocial implicit leadership hypothesis of intergroup relations using masculine and feminine faces.

This paper examines the impact of facial cues on leadership emergence. Using evolutionary social psychology, we expand upon implicit and contingent theories of leadership and propose that different types of intergroup relations elicit different implicit cognitive leadership prototypes. It is argued that a biologically based hormonal connection between behavior and corresponding facial characteristics interacts with evolutionarily consistent social dynamics to influence leadership emergence. We predict that masculine-looking leaders are selected during intergroup conflict (war) and feminine-looking leaders during intergroup cooperation (peace). Across two experiments we show that a general categorization of leader versus nonleader is an initial implicit requirement for emergence, and at a context-specific level facial cues of masculinity and femininity contingently affect war versus peace leadership emergence in the predicted direction. In addition, we replicate our findings in Experiment 1 across culture using Western and East Asian samples. In Experiment 2, we also show that masculine-feminine facial cues are better predictors of leadership than male-female cues. Collectively, our results indicate a multi-level classification of context-specific leadership based on visual cues imbedded in the human face and challenge traditional distinctions of male and female leadership.

The general age of leadership: Older-looking presidential candidates win elections during war

As nation-state leaders age they increasingly engage in inter-state militarized disputes yet in industrialized societies a steady decrease in testosterone associated with aging is observed – which suggests a decrease in dominance behavior. The current paper points out that from modern societies to Old World monkeys increasing both in age and social status encourages dominant strategies to maintain acquired rank. Moreover, it is argued this consistency has shaped an implicit prototype causing followers to associate older age with dominance leadership. It is shown that (i) faces of older leaders are preferred during intergroup conflict and (ii) morphing U.S. Presidential candidates to appear older or younger has an overriding effect on actual election outcomes. This indicates that democratic voting can be systematically adjusted by activating innate biases. These findings appear to create a new line of research regarding the biology of leadership and contextual cues of age.

Leadership in Organizations: An Evolutionary Perspective

In this chapter we discuss the potential of evolution to serve as a framework for unifying our understanding of leadership. From this perspective we consider the ultimate origins and functions of leadership, the role of co-evolution, and methods for testing evolution-based leadership hypotheses. To begin, we examine evolutionarily stable situation dynamics in the environment (e.g., intergroup conflict) that may have selected for (1) leadership behavior as well as (2) corresponding human traits intended to signal potential leadership ability and use this argument to support the notion of context-specific “cognitive leadership prototypes”. Particular attention is also given to the role of the follower and the specific pressures encouraging “followership investment”. In addition, co-evolution logic is used to examine the intricate relationship between the environment, human culture, and the emergence of certain leadership styles. Next, we discuss five methods for testing an evolution-based hypothesis of leadership and followership. Finally, we highlight practical implications which include appreciating the role of the follower, the impact of social constructs on modern leadership, the benefits of distributed leadership, and the importance of feminine leadership styles. Also, for consideration throughout the chapter, organizational examples are provided such as the homogenization of corporate culture and the current role of monarchies in Western society.

A face for all seasons: Searching for context-specific leadership traits and discovering a general preference for perceived health

Previous research indicates that followers tend to contingently match particular leader qualities to evolutionarily consistent situations requiring collective action (i.e., context-specific cognitive leadership prototypes) and information processing undergoes categorization which ranks certain qualities as first-order context-general and others as second-order context-specific. To further investigate this contingent categorization phenomenon we examined the “attractiveness halo”—a first-order facial cue which significantly biases leadership preferences. While controlling for facial attractiveness, we independently manipulated the underlying facial cues of health and intelligence and then primed participants with four distinct organizational dynamics requiring leadership (i.e., competition vs. cooperation between groups and exploratory change vs. stable exploitation). It was expected that the differing requirements of the four dynamics would contingently select for relatively healthier- or intelligent-looking leaders. We found perceived facial intelligence to be a second-order context-specific trait—for instance, in times requiring a leader to address between-group cooperation—whereas perceived health is significantly preferred across all contexts (i.e., a first-order trait). The results also indicate that facial health positively affects perceived masculinity while facial intelligence negatively affects perceived masculinity, which may partially explain leader choice in some of the environmental contexts. The limitations and a number of implications regarding leadership biases are discussed.

An Agent-Based Evolutionary Model of Leadership

Leadership is a robust human behaviour, which occurs rapidly in groups. It is argued that leadership provides a solution to coordination problems in groups and allows maximizing group benefits while minimizing group costs. In this paper a novel, agent-based model of leadership is presented, which is based on recently emerging literature on the human evolution. The model advances on the traditional research on leadership by identifying fitness-relevant situation dynamics that remained consistent throughout human evolution to select for specific leadership and follower ship characteristics. Incorporating the mechanics of evolution and the associated environmental pressures accounts for the innate tendencies of human leadership and follower ship, and consequently yields an increased level of model validity. The application of the model is illustrated by two voting examples and an empirical study, which provide an indication of the model validity.