It was interesting to read Von Rueden & Van Vugt’s article as it mentioned contingency leadership, transformational leadership, and the leader-member exchange theory which are all models that I have studied in my Organizational Behavior class this semester. However, like the article mentioned, these theories are mainly applied on a larger scale and not when studying small-scale societies. I found it interesting that in large-scale and small-scale societies, men usually have the advantage and are usually higher up on the totem pole, even if only by a little bit. Another concept that we discussed in my OB class was how self-led teams are more realistic in a smaller setting. When too many people become involved in a focused group, it becomes imperative for tasks to be delegated so that everyone has a purpose and stays focused and does not fight with other group members, so leadership becomes necessary. But in smaller groups, the whole group knows what everyone’s designated role is and so there is not always a need for a leader to delegate or guide them. I was very surprised to see the overlap such a direct overlap between these two classes because they take very different approaches to leadership.
Critical Thinking
I also found the part about small group leadership interesting. It made me think of focus groups or specialty groups within large corporations. I find it much more effective to be efficient in these smaller groups because like you said, everybody knows their role and there isn’t just one overarching leader trying to command most of the power. Then again, the value of leaders and leadership cannot be argued, especially in those large work environments that mirror those of small scale societies.
It might be interesting to compare the tasks done by leaders of small-scale leaders and large-scale leaders because I imagine they would be very different as the large-scale leader would begin to delegate tasks. These two people that fill the same function might have very different jobs that they actually do.
I think another problem that sometimes arises with focus groups is that they are not equally representative of populations, and so the results are almost always skewed.
I think it’s awesome you are able to make connections between this course with the material in your Organizational Behavior, as we sometimes get lost in the nature of the course. The evolutionary leadership perspective is crucial when studying how humans work and interact in the workplace (and other contexts) today.
In my social sciences class, we talked about how women are usually better at reading faces and emotions. We also discussed how this is important for leadership and how women can be better leaders because of their ability to see underlying emotions. I think it was interesting how you mentioned that men tend to have more leadership positions because of evolutionary traits like size and strength when women may have better traits for leadership.