On the agricultural origins of leadership behaviours and followers’ preferences: The case of Participative leadership
In this project, I test an evolutionary-informed theory that suggests that leadership became especially coercive and less participative in ancestral societies using particularly intensive forms of agriculture (e.g., crop rotation, irrigation). In a first study, I show a negative relationship between ancestral agriculture intensity and followers’ endorsement of participative leadership style in contemporary organizations. In a second study, I show that ancestral agricultural intensity decreases reliance on delegation to subordinates among top-ranked managers of contemporary companies. Results from the two studies are robust to the inclusion of several ancestral and present-day control variables. I use instrumental variables regressions to achieve causal identification and Monte Carlo simulations to show that the results cannot be explained by overfitting or limited sample size. Overall, the results confirm recent evidence underlining how traditional socio-ecological environments can shape our current behaviours and provides novel insights for leadership theory and practice.