ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2014
The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: the theory of service-for-prestige.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Examining the Inverted U-Shaped Relationship Between Benevolent Leadership and Employees' Work Initiative: The Role of Work Engagement and Growth Need Strength.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
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- Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary-Developmental Origins.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- The Marginal Utility of Inequality : A Global Examination across Ethnographic Societies.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Voluntary leadership and the emergence of institutions for self-governance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Psychological foundations of human status allocation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- When and Why Leaders' Helping Behavior Promotes Employees' Thriving: Exploring the Role of Voice Behavior and Perceived Leader's Role Overload.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- The dynamics of men's cooperation and social status in a small-scale society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Social Signaling and the Warrior-Big-Man among the Western Dani : A Man Called Tibenuk.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Evolutionary Models of Leadership : Tests and Synthesis.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leader-follower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leader-follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, they ultimately evolved into exchange relationships whereby followers could compensate leaders for services which would otherwise have been prohibitively costly for leaders to provide. In this exchange, leaders incur costs to provide followers with public goods, and in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders with prestige (and associated fitness benefits). Because whole groups of followers tend to gain from leader-provided public goods, and because prestige is costly for followers to produce, the provisioning of prestige to leaders requires solutions to the "free rider" problem of disrespectful followers (who benefit from leader services without sharing the costs of producing prestige). Thus service-for-prestige makes the unique prediction that disrespectful followers of beneficial leaders will be targeted by other followers for punitive sentiment and/or social exclusion. Leader-follower relations should be more reciprocal and mutually beneficial when leaders and followers have more equal social bargaining power. However, as leaders gain more relative power, and their high status becomes less dependent on their willingness to pay the costs of benefitting followers, service-for-prestige predicts that leader-follower relations will become based more on leaders' ability to dominate and exploit rather than benefit followers. We review evidential support for a set of predictions made by service-for-prestige, and discuss how service-for-prestige relates to social neuroscience research on leadership.
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