Organizational Leadership and Natural Selection

Abstract

Two recent books challenged my thinking about human nature and organizational leadership: The Social Conquest of Earth by the distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Wilson's controversial thesis is that through natural selection, humans have two genetically determined behavioral drives that sometimes clash-one individualistic and selfish and the other collaborative and altruistic. Jobs described to Isaacson his view of what it takes to fire up the altruistic genes to create a great collaborative team, an idea that challenges popular ideas about leadership. Jobs seems to have developed a management philosophy that synthesizes selfish and altruistic drives, challenging popular ideas about great leadership. Wilson writes that Charles Darwin anticipated a combination of individual and group selection . For instance, Darwin proposed, an individual motivated by pure self-interest might invent a weapon or other means of attack or defense that would help a tribe to increase in number and supplant other tribes. In such a tribe, there would be a better chance of producing more innovative members. Wilson builds on this, writing: If we assume that groups are approximately equal to one another in weaponry and other technology, which has been the case for most of the time among primitive societies over hundreds of thousands of years, we can expect that the outcome of between-group competition is determined largely by the details of social behavior within each group in turn. These traits are the size and tightness of the group, and the quality of communication and division of labor among its members. Such traits are heritable to some degree; in other words, variation in them is due in part to differences in genes among the members of the group, hence also among the groups themselves. The genetic fitness of each member, the number of reproducing descendants it leaves, is determined by the cost exacted and benefit gained from its membership in the group. These include the favor or disfavor it earns from other group members on the basis of its behavior. The currency of favor is paid by direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity, the later in the form of repetition and trust. How well a group performs depends on how well its members work together, regardless of the degree by which each is individually favored or disfavored within the group. (55-56) he logic of Wilson's argument, buttressed by his examples of strong collaboration in groups, is that altruistic genes are fired up by threats to a group. Experience confirms this logic. It does not take exceptional leadership to get people to collaborate when they're threatened. Spontaneous altruistic actions often occur in war and competitive team sports. As Wilson writes, humans are compulsive group-seekers, tribal animals that satisfy this need variously in extended families, organized religion, political groups, ethnic groups, and sports clubs. When people are threatened, their group identities are instinctively strengthened. This is dramatically evident in recent Middle Eastern conflicts where religious group identities are matters of life or death. Similarly, people sometimes identify so strongly with teams in sports that they see opponents as deadly enemies. A game of soccer football even provoked a war between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969. In all likelihood, there is considerable variation among people in the strength of their individualistic and altruistic genes. Some people are more altruistic and helpful than others; some are extremely individualistic. But modern bureaucracies are structured with the assumption that people are most strongly motivated by self-interest. Managers are taught that if organizational roles and processes are designed well, each individual's output will combine to produce the desired product. When I was a consultant to the executives of a large technology company, a vice president complained that the CEO would listen to the views of the vice presidents but then make decisions by himself. …