Testing multi-disciplinary theories of leadership using a cross-cultural database

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

All societies have leaders. In many societies, such as the United States, there is a hierarchy of leadership positions corresponding to spatial administrative hierarchies, such as of cities, counties, states, and the Federal government. In other societies, such hierarchies do not exist and the rights and duties of leaders are not formally delineated. This global variability has produced an equal variety of scholarly theories; nonetheless, leadership remains poorly understood. For example, why do some leaders use physical threats and aggression to instill fear in their followers, but other leaders attract followers with their skills and knowledge? Some theories emphasize our primate heritage: in groups of primates, physically stronger individuals can dominate physically weaker individuals. This might help explain why some human leaders physically threaten their followers. Other theories point to the importance of leaders in promoting human cooperation: leaders might be needed to maintain cooperation in large groups by organizing the division of labor and punishing free-riders. Alternatively, leaders might be important during warfare and other forms of conflict between groups. Still other theories emphasize the transmission of valuable knowledge from one generation to the next, which might explain why leaders often have superior skills and abilities. These theories have important implications for selecting and training leaders in a broad number of roles, such as in schools; local, state, and federal government agencies; businesses; and numerous other organizations. Unfortunately, none of these theories has been tested systematically across the full range of social types. Therefore, to address this gap, Washington State University anthropologist, Dr. Edward H. Hagen, will test theories of leadership using the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), a database of millions of digitized pages of books, articles and other documents that describe hundreds of different societies. The HRAF database captures much of the known cultural diversity of human society and can be used for a wide, cross-cultural test of several influential theories of leadership. The investigator will begin by operationalizing key theories of leadership from anthropology, psychology, sociology, and biology to produce set of variables that will be used to code each ethnographic account of leadership in the HRAF. The coded accounts will then be used to test these theories. Second, the texts discussing the qualities and functions of leaders, and the costs and benefits of leadership for both leaders and followers, will be isolated and coded for analyses providing the first systematic cross-cultural data on these subjects. Third, the HRAF material will be subject to meta-ethnographic and text-mining techniques, such as latent semantic analysis, with the goal of identifying commonalities and differences among the reported cases and cultural models of leadership. The research will give the emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary leadership theory a comprehensive cross-cultural foundation and provide an empirical basis for future evolutionary and cultural models of leadership. The database produced by the project will be made available to other scholars and to the general public. The methodology used will be a model for future investigations using the HRAF. Funding this research also provides a mentored research opportunity for two American graduate students.