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WHAT makes a good leader? Do different political, economic and social situations demand leaders with particular styles? How should we judge who is right for the job? Why are we so often disappointed with those in charge?

In the run-up to the US elections Americans will doubtless be asking such questions. They are not alone. Leadership is an issue that pervades almost every aspect of our lives, from the family and the office to our local community, national politics and beyond. No wonder the subject attracts so much attention.

Despite the seeming glut of information, however, one aspect has been sorely missing 鈥� the historical perspective. Until recently, very few people have considered the origins of leadership. Yet to understand how our ancestors acquired the psychological biases upon which leadership is based is to see the concept in a whole new light. In particular, the evolutionary perspective highlights the importance of those who follow and the reasons why leaders and followers may not see eye to eye. It can also indicate what sort of leader is best suited to take charge in a particular situation. It can explain some of our seemingly arbitrary preferences 鈥� for tall leaders, for example 鈥� and it even suggests why there is a bias towards men as leaders.

In essence, leadership is a response to the need for collective action. How do members of a group decide what to do and how and when to do it? An obvious solution is for one individual to take the initiative and provide guidance while the rest agree to follow. If this strategy promotes survival, then psychological adaptations for both leadership and 鈥渇ollowership鈥� are likely to evolve. In humans these would have included specialised mental mechanisms for planning, communication, group decision-making, competence recognition, social learning and conflict management. Although such traits are generally associated with higher reasoning, cognitive pre-adaptations for leadership probably evolved long before modern humans ever appeared on the scene.

The foraging patterns of many insects, the schooling of fish and the flying patterns of birds all suggest that species lacking complex cognitive capacities can nevertheless display leadership and followership 鈥� perhaps using the simple rule 鈥渇ollow the one who moves first鈥�. Our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, also use leadership to coordinate group movement and to keep the peace or wage war.

First among equals

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 ().

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鈥檚 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 鈥淏ig Men鈥� 鈥� the best hunters and warriors or wisest elders, for example 鈥� 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 鈥� 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.

So, what can evolution tell us about modern leadership? The ancestral environment may have equipped us with innate preferences for certain characteristics in our leaders. For a start, we want them to be both competent and benevolent, because these sorts of people will be better at acquiring resources and more willing to share them. We also tend to choose leaders with certain physical characteristics. Other theories of leadership have failed to account for the importance of seemingly arbitrary attributes such as height, age, weight and health, but these make sense from an evolutionary perspective. For example, ancestral Big Men were probably quite literally that: by dint of their imposing physique, tall people would have been more effective peacekeepers and more intimidating foes. Even today we have a bias towards taller leaders (). In ancestral times elders were likely to have acquired specialist knowledge, and in the modern world older leaders are preferred in situations where knowledge is crucial, such as in running public corporations (Leadership and Governance from the Inside Out, edited by Robert Gandossy and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Wiley, 2004). Followers may also have evolved a preference for fit and healthy leaders in situations where strength and stamina mattered. That could be why modern voters prefer physically fit and energetic political candidates ().

More controversially, evolution might explain our bias towards male leaders in most circumstances. When men and women work together, men are quicker to claim leadership roles even when women are better qualified (). Moreover, a recent experiment by myself and Brian Spisak, also at the University of Kent (to be published in Psychological Science later this year), revealed that groups tend to look to men for leadership when faced with a threat from another group, possibly because inter-group conflict would have been resolved by force throughout most of human history. However, we also found that in situations where there is internal conflict in a group, women are the preferred and most effective leaders. This is confirmed by a recent mock election study which found that people tended to vote for a male president when their country was at war, but a female during peacetime (). A history of inter-group conflict might have predisposed men to adopt a hierarchical leadership style, while a need for social unity might have equipped women with a more egalitarian, personalised and communal style. If the predominance of male leaders in many sectors of modern life is a vestige of our past, it could be a costly one in an interconnected world in which the emphasis is on interpersonal skills and network-building.

This raises another important aspect of leadership that is often overlooked 鈥� that what constitutes good leadership varies according to the situation. The different leadership styles adopted by various organisations, nations and cultures can be understood in part by considering the specific challenges posed by their particular physical and social environment. In the Netherlands and Australia, for example, where harsh natural conditions force the authorities to collaborate closely with citizens, there is a strong egalitarian ethos. In emergencies such as wars or natural disasters, followers readily defer to the decisions of a single autocratic individual. Indeed, US voters tend to choose hawkish presidents when threatened by war.

All this suggests that leadership and followership are flexible strategies shaped by the interplay between ancient evolutionary pressures and modern environmental and cultural demands. However, 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 鈥� in corporate America it runs at 50 per cent (). 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鈥檚 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 upside is that insights from evolution also suggest more effective leadership strategies. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the idea of shared or distributed leadership. Some organisations are finding that executives are more likely to succeed if subordinates are included in the selection process. Meanwhile, effective businesses 鈥� including Toyota and Virgin 鈥� are designing and structuring their organisations to more closely resemble hunter-gatherer bands. For instance, they delegate decision-making to managers far down the chain of command, creating functional groups of between 50 and 150 members.

By emphasising interdependence and shared interests, values and goals, a truly transformational leader can change followers from self-interested individuals to committed collectivists. Unfortunately, such people are thin on the ground. Instead, we are often required to defer to leaders whose remit and behaviour is inconsistent with our evolved expectations of leadership. That can be alienating, but at least followers can sometimes do something about it. That is exactly what millions of US citizens will be doing when they exercise their power to vote for a new president.

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