Leading with Purposeful Intent: Leveraging the Hidden Relationship between Competition and Leadership

Where were you in the 1980s? Political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sought to liberate the economic vitality of enterprise and value creation through laissez-faire policies. The businesses of the era, led by hard-driving focused champions of competition such as Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca, were constructing environments designed to maximize shareholder value. 

These were leaders who broke the mold of conventional consensual bureaucracy. But look back a-ways to how that corporate paradigm came into being—through Henry Ford and his successors who built what was dubbed “the machine bureaucracy”—and you see how principles of rationality and efficiency created the post-Victorian era of social development. Looking ahead, it is not obvious how these developments would ultimately arrive at Steve Jobs, Marissa Meyer, Ginni Rometty, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and the legions of digital-age leaders who have played a part in creating highly empowered environments for the flowering of technological wizardry.

Current thinking on economic development sees this evolution as the development of institutions in ways that adapt to the needs of the times. This argument is all well and good, but it is dehumanized. Such economic analyses overlook the role of agents, even though institutions are created by groups of willed individuals and sustained by their directive energy. This is the historic mission of leadership and has been throughout the course of human evolution. 

Leadership—as a process of leaders, followers, and circumstance—brings people together, helps them to find or define a common purpose, and shapes the coordination of effort, often via the design of institutions, towards solving collective action problems. For example, a CEO (the leader) brings together their team (the followers) to develop a strategic plan and design a system of incentives to encourage collaboration in a time of extreme economic and environmental uncertainty (circumstance).  

This is the perspective that the study of evolution brings to the study of leadership, redefining it as an adaptive process for success and growth.

Constructing your future with purposeful intent

In an article appearing in the Academy of Management Review, my coauthors and I used the biologically inspired concept of “niche construction”—the process whereby individuals, through their activities, interactions, and choices, modify their own and each other’s environments—to understand how leadership can create strategic selection pressures with a variety of downstream consequences (Spisak et al., 2015).

Throughout the course of human evolution, I argue, leadership has become an extremely powerful adaptive process, doing much more than merely responding to group coordination problems in the natural environment. Leadership can also drive modifications of that environment and create novel evolutionary pressures to orchestrate processes of change. This perspective connects biological and social sciences to provide a startling, novel, and clear picture of organizational evolution and behavior. 

Whether biological or cultural, evolution operates on a set of fundamental principles—i.e., variation, selection, and replication of the relatively more adaptive options—which can be used to model organizational change. Evolutionary science offers a unifying theory that integrates the accumulating insights from the biological sciences to enhance a decision-maker’s understanding and prediction of the effects of leadership via its interaction with the organizational environment. It also raises challenging questions about how and why humans arrived at large-scale coordination capabilities. 

For example, in my article, we state, “It is both fascinating and helpful to understand what initially allowed us to cross the threshold from informal [kin-based] leadership into formal, less genetically related leadership, given that (1) natural selection focuses primarily on the individual level (Williams, 1966), while (2) large-scale formalized leadership in loosely related social networks typically involves an asymmetric payoff favoring the leader (i.e., a relative cost to the individual follower; Hammerstein, 2003)” (p. 296; Spisak et al., 2015).

Followers often engage in costly behaviors that violate assumptions of self-interest—what has been referred to as “followership investment” (Spisak, et al., 2011). Consider frontline soldiers at the extreme. Yes, they may, over time, increase their reputation—and ultimately their success—through acts of bravery. Still, there is a time lag with many risks between costly investment and beneficial return at the individual level. However, were it not for this sacrifice of immediate self-interest, armies—and large-scale organizations in general—would have a hard time stabilizing and competing with other groups.

Followers often engage in costly behaviors that violate assumptions of self-interest.

One of the primary assumptions I apply to explain such large-scale leadership and followership dynamics is derived from what is called “multilevel selection theory.” Simply put, if the pressure for success is at the individual level, people tend to focus on self-interest. However, if the pressure for success is at the group level, then altruistically sacrificing for the group is adaptive. Thus, with a bit of help from leadership, the frequently quoted observation from Wilson and Wilson (p. 345; 2007) seems to be highly plausible: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.” 

The questions we ask in the article are, “Why do these large-scale dynamics evolve?” and “What is the coevolutionary role of leadership?”

Cold wars and warm regards

Let’s consider pre- and post-Cold War in the United States as an anecdotal example of this multilevel tension for success and how leadership can influence evolutionary change through niche construction. 

Specifically, toward the end of the Cold War, U.S. healthcare and tuition costs began to skyrocket (e.g., Cutler & Madrian, 1998; Helen & Rogers, 2006). At the same time, employee/CEO pay gaps expanded rapidly (Hall & Liebman, 1998). From a multilevel perspective, one could argue that, as group-level pressures eased—that is, as the Soviet Union fell and the United States became the sole superpower—pressure for success increased at the individual level.

Throughout the Cold War, two powerful groups constructed opposing national-economic “niches”—Communism and Capitalism. When the USSR “lost,” competition in the United States shifted away from a foreign ‘other’ and was refocused inward. Consequently, the prosocial costs individuals had accepted to strengthen group ‘fitness’—such as subsidized health care and tuition—were less acceptable in the post-Cold War dynamic than were competitive benefits, individually amassed, from self-interested and profit-maximizing strategies.

One can see, at this point, how leadership intervened to modify the post-Cold War national-economic niche. It can be argued that this shift in competitive focus, from between-group to within-group, allowed for the leadership process to construct a different cultural architecture. Recall the switch to laissez-faire deregulation and a fixation on shareholder value mentioned in the introduction. 

To reiterate, leadership is a powerful process for adjusting the evolutionary trajectory of society with lasting and significant downstream effects.

Leadership is a powerful process for adjusting the evolutionary trajectory of society.

The present effects of future discounting

What are some of the contemporary consequences of previous niche construction? 

I propose that a niche specifically constructed to favor individual interests ultimately weakens the group, making it vulnerable to a new round of group-level pressures. For example, it will be interesting to see if China's economic (and military) rise will correlate negatively with the costs of health care and tuition in the United States. If multilevel selection theory holds then as China becomes more competitive, through its own niche construction, the pressure for success in the United States may well revert from the individual level back to the group level. 

If I am correct in this, and the logic of multilevel selection theory prevails, then leadership will need to change gears and begin constructing a niche that selects for pro-socially adaptive outcomes at the group level to address between-group competition. Perhaps, for instance, U.S. health care and tuition costs will decrease, and CEO/employee pay gaps will shrink as a sign of altruistic/prosocial investment in response to increasing group-level pressure. From a management perspective, it will be interesting to see if there is a shift in orientation away from single-minded shareholder value toward stakeholder reciprocity. I suspect yes, and some would argue that this is already occurring.

Even Jack Welch—one of the godfathers of shareholder value primacy—changed his tune. In a 2009 interview, he said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company” (Guerrera, 2009).

In other words, it may no longer be acceptable or sustainable (more importantly, from an evolutionary perspective) to progress with our past levels of self-interested behavior and social policy.

What you can do

Leadership is an amazing social process that is both a product and a driver of human cultural evolution. If you want to be part of today’s grand shift in business and society, first keep in mind that leadership makes history, and history makes leadership, in a cyclical pattern that has persisted for millennia.

Leadership is an amazing social process that is both a product and a driver of human cultural evolution

If society is returning to group-level niche construction, then leaders will need to adopt leadership processes that create desirable downstream impacts, with necessary group-level benefits. The profile of such leadership may differ significantly from the Gordon Gekko “greed is good” mentality. 

Instead of the usual leadership cocktail—charisma, dominance, and status-seeking—organizations will need leaders who excel in empathy, diplomacy, and what has been referred to as “tending-and-befriending” (Taylor et al., 2000). This profile shift will be essential for creating the necessary streams of reciprocity and trust to sustain success and growth. It is not adaptive to maintain a single-minded focus on shareholders—a small part of the larger stakeholder community—when significant between-group competition is knocking at the door. 

As my Academy of Management Review article concludes, “Ultimately, it will be the quality of leadership and the willingness and ability of followers to execute niche construction strategies that will dictate the success and failure of future organizational forms” (Spisak et al., 2015). 

Pretending to embrace pro-sociality as a branding exercise no longer cuts it. Those who are not seen to advance the group will be rejected by it.

Note: A version of this publication originally appeared as a blog on This View of Life (2015). 

---

Brian R. Spisak is a research associate at Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, a business and leadership technologist, and an independent advisor on business transformation. He is also the author of the upcoming book Computational Leadership – Connecting Behavioral Science and Technology to Optimize Decision-Making and Increase Profits. (Preorder now!)