ePrints

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

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Daniel Nettle

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.

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 metadata

Author(s): Smith JE, Gavrilets S, Mulder MB, Hooper PL, El Mouden C, Nettle D, Hauert C, Hill K, Perry S, Pusey AE, van Vugt M, Smith EA

Publication type: Review

Publication status: Published

Journal: Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Year: 2016

Volume: 31

Issue: 1

Pages: 54-66

Print publication date: 01/01/2016

Online publication date: 06/11/2015

Acceptance date: 01/01/1900

ISSN (print): 0169-5347

Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.09.013

DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2015.09.013

Share