Selfish versus Servant Leadership
Are people who take leadership positions motivated mainly by selfish interests or the interests of their followers? It is easy enough to cite examples proving one side or the other but researchers Gillet (U Osnabrueck), Cartwright (U Kent), and van Vugt (VU Amsterdam) wanted to add rigor to the debate.
Among evolutionary biologists and psychologists, there are two theories on the origins of leadership. The dominant idea views leadership as the outcome of status battles between group members. The winner (leader) exercises power over lower-ranked individuals.
The alternative idea sees leadership as a coordination device that helps group members plan, execute group tasks, and divvy up resources. In this view, leaders serve the interests of followers.
To test these two ideas, Gillet and colleagues conducted two social decision-making experiments. They examined the behaviors of individuals in four-player coordination games in which the individuals had the option to go first (lead) or wait (follow); their decisions were associated with certain monetary pay-offs. The researchers then linked the players’ decisions to data from personality questionnaires and their earnings in the game.
“The core question in these games is who leads and how do they fare compared to followers in terms of their earnings in the game?” the researchers report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Gillet et al found that leaders were more likely to be rated as pro-social rather than selfish. And they discovered that these “servant leaders” seemingly sacrificed some of their own gains for the benefit of the group.
“Leaders, on average, earned less money than followers and dispositionally social participants (on the basis of their social value orientation) chose to lead more often than selfish participants,” the researchers report. “Additionally there is no relationship between leadership and the kind of personality traits that are usually associated with selfish leadership, most notably personal dominance.”
As the researchers admit, the experiments were run in an anonymous setting that did not enable group members to form status and dominance hierarchies commonly seen in the brutish real world. So this line of thinking is a work in progress, albeit one that gives servant leaders a measure of redemption.
Gillet, J., Cartwright, E., & Vugt, M. (2010). Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.06.003
photo credit: Clinton Steeds



